The month of May 2013 has been one of the busiest in the history of ELAR. We processed some large and complex collections, such as Megan Biesele’s Ju|’hoan (ktz) Audio and Video Material 1970 to Present: A Work in Progress which contains almost 900 files from 98 speakers (all of whom are listed on the deposit home page and linked to their individual recordings), and reached a major landmark for the number of collections now available online (more on this in a later post).
We have also been busy working with depositors (a number of whom took the occasion of participating in activities during Endangered Languages Week to also arrange to visit ELAR) and with our users. As mentioned previously the number of users continues to grow monthly and May saw a record of 46 new user registrations. We now have over 1,000 registered active users.
Through our online subscription system ELAR serves as a communication channel between depositors and registered users. For materials with restricted access (such as those labelled “Subscriber” or “Community”) users can request access and explain why they want to be able to use the material in that category. This generates an email to which the depositor can respond. During May we had 5 such requests, one of the most moving of which is the following (names and languages have been anonymised using alphabetic labels):
“My name is A. My Uncles are B, C and D who are X. Their Uncle was the last full-blood X Chief. As a young boy, I was taken fishing at S by a tribal elder E who was (X/Chinese) and he taught me X when I was young. I did not know it at the time, because he never told me that is what I was learning. I have been gone away from home for the past 22 years in the military, only coming home for funerals and vacations. I know live in P and although I am closer to home, I am not around anyone who speaks the language. F is a close friend and she is one of the keepers of the language along with G. I would like to be able to access the language so I can practice what I have forgotten and keep the language alive.”
ELAR is proud that one of the services it provides is linking up users with a deep interest in the materials listed in our catalogue (and subject to controlled access) with the depositors and communities they work with, so that dialogue can take place that leads to benefits for all concerned.