Archiving and Depositing Policy
The Language Archive Cologne has the explicit mission to preserve digital audio and video data, annotations, and other digital language data in the long term, and to promote and disseminate these resources. As part of this mission, we offer archiving services to researchers, institutions and individuals that are in the possession of data related to our mission.
We offer our services to any researchers, institutions and individuals – explicitely including students and native speakers – worldwide and in particular in regions where there are no local institutions offering such support. We provide support from the early planning phase to the realization of language documentation and other fieldwork based language research projects. We provide information and assistance regarding methodological and technical aspects and in particular relating to equipment, digital tools and formats and in particular metadata creation.
In case of planned and current research projects, interested parties are expected to contact the LAC helpdesk early on in the project, preferably in the planning phase. If you are in possession of (legacy) language data or know of eligible resources – in particular from endangered languages – in need of archiving, we highly encourage you to get in touch withus.
Even if we might not be the appropriate institution to archive your data, we are always willing to help you find an appropriate institution to deposit your data. If you have any question relating archiving or our services please don’t hesitate to contact us via the LAC helpdesk.