Check out the latest Language Archives Network News [sorry Dave!]newsletter here. It’s got helpful information on how the Max Planck Institute (Nijmegen) can help you set up a local archive, a system of cataloguing linguistics information (IMDI) about your recordings, and on getting permanent unique resource identifiers for stuff stored on the web. And it’s also got an article on recording information about plants and animals in the field that you might read in conjunction with Tom’s post on this topic.
Gail Coelho writes about how to document plants, including advice on what to photograph, an ethnobotanical form for filling in information, and what cameras and equipment is needed. It’s based on her fieldwork with Betta Kurumba people of Tamil Nadu. She makes the point strongly that her consultants rely on context in identifying plants and animals – and seeing plants out of context can be confusing. Certainly, for speakers of the Central Australian language Warumungu that I worked with, a major classifying principle is habitat – plants and animals are classified as wangarri-warinyi (hill/stone dwellers), karlampi-warinyi (creek-dwellers) and so on. She’s got a helpful checklist of what you need to give the botanist for identification – and she includes a delicate reminder that in many areas you can’t just go ripping mushrooms and ferns out of the ground without permission.
And on the archiving front, people without local digital archives such as PARADISEC may well want to investigate MPI’s generous offer:
Setting up local archives
We can set up local archives using MPI-developed software. Primarily this includes LAMUS (Language Archive Management and Upload System), AMS (Access Management System), and the IMDI (ISLE Metadata Initiative) infrastructure. This setup allows archivists to ingest new resources into their archive, to manage access policies, and to provide user access to resources via the web. The setup can be extended (if desired) by installing content access applications such as ANNEX (access to annotated media streams) and LEXUS (access to multimedia lexica). Experts from the MPI set up the software, provide training for archivists and system managers, and finally hand over management of the system. If desired, we can set up a dynamic link to ensure that local changes are also applied to a mirror site at the MPI, thereby fully integrating the local archive into MPI’s long-term preservation strategy.
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