SSILA Archiving Award
In Honor of Michael Krauss
The SSILA Archiving Award in Honor of Michael Krauss highlights the importance of creating long-term archival materials that are accessible to all communities concerned, including heritage and language communities as well as scholarly communities. It is meant to encourage others in academia to value such work as more comparable to analytic research.
Deadline for annual receipt of nominations is October 15.
The award is presented to one or more researchers (from any community) who have created an accessible documentary collection of materials relating to an Indigenous language of the Americas.
Taking each collection’s context and ethical protocols into account, the collection will be assessed on the following characteristics:
It should be diverse in content, including some annotated or transcribed material.
It should be well described through collection-level metadata, item-level metadata, and a finding aid or descriptive overview which includes how the language community’s priorities have been met.
Its content should be potentially impactful for language learners, language maintenance, language teaching, and scholarly research.
The collection, or a back-up of the collection, should be archived in an established and trusted repository, one that is created and maintained by an institution with a demonstrated commitment to permanence and the long-term preservation of archived resources with suitable rights management practices to allow access to as much of the collections as possible.
Its content should be open and accessible to heritage and source communities as well as scholarly communities. Accessibility may include a dedicated website that repurposes primary archived material with added value, but a website cannot be nominated.
This award may be shared by multiple creators of a single collection (including, for example, academic and non-academic researchers, primary language consultants, and collection curators.) The award is given to the named creators of the collection for that archival deposit, not the repository or archive, and it carries a stipend of $500. Nominations must be made by a member of SSILA. Self-nominations are permitted.
A nominating package should include:
Cover Sheet (download and fill out)
Letter of nomination identifying the nominee(s) (with curriculum vitae as appropriate), describing the background of their work on the language in question, and the archival collection (with links to online content and metadata, and a finding aid or descriptive overview), explaining its quality and significance, and including the nominee’s email address, and
One supporting letter also explaining the quality and significance of the archival collection.
If you have questions about the award, please direct them to Mary Linn (secretary@ssila.org). To submit a nomination for the SSILA Archiving Award, send the nomination and letter of recommendation in PDF format by email to the SSILA Secretary. Please verify that it has in fact been received.
Nominations should be submitted to Mary Linn (secretary@ssila.org) by the end of the day September 15.