This award highlights the importance of creating long-term archived materials that are accessible to all communities concerned, including heritage and source 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: October 15, 2020

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, each collection so honored will be assessed on the following characteristics:

It should be linguistically and/or ethnographically rich.
It should include primary materials, including (but not limited to) field notes, audio or video recordings, and other items created in language documentation. It may also include secondary materials, including (but not limited to) educational materials, analysis of the language, or related media.

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 creators of the collection, not the repository or archive. Nominations must be made by a member of SSILA. Self-nominations are permitted.

The nominating package should include:

a 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), and explaining its quality and significance, 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 October 15, 2020.