Community access to language archives
Digital language archives preserve rich materials in endangered or marginalised languages. Technical limitations, interface design, language choices, and other factors, however, often make these recordings difficult to access for members of the very language communities where they originated. This paper presents a questionnaire that aims to understand how language community members use digital media, and what type of archival language materials would be of interest to them. Establishing this will aid in finding better ways to make language recordings in digital language archives findable and usable for the speakers and their descendants. Furthermore the questionnaire will serve as a template for researchers beginning a language documentation project, who want to design their language collections with long-term accessibility to the materials for the community in mind.