The Society for the Study of the Indigenous Languages of the Americas (SSILA) is very pleased to announce a new award, the SSILA Archiving Award.

This award 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.

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 be diverse in content, including some annotated or transcribed material.
It should be housed in a long-term preservation archive.
Its content should be accessible to heritage and language communities as well as scholarly communities.
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.

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).

Nominations may be made by anyone and 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 significance
one supporting letter also explaining the significance of the archival collection

Self-nominations are permitted.

If you have questions about the award, please direct them to Andrew Garrett (garrett@berkeley.edu), Chair of the Archiving Award Committee. Nominations should be submitted to Andrew Garrett (garrett@berkeley.edu) by September 15.