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Information for Depositors

AILLA's resources come from the AILLA user community: speakers of indigenous languages and scholars who study those languages. Archiving your materials with AILLA is completely free of charge. AILLA does not pay for any archive resources; they are donated by our depositors.

The AILLA Depositor Packet includes all the forms you need to deposit materials with AILLA, including our License Agreement and information about restricting access to particular resources.

What kinds of materials do we accept?

AILLA welcomes all kinds of materials in and about the indigenous languages of Latin America. The archive hosts a highly diverse collection that includes audio, video, image, and text materials ranging from poetry to multilingual dictionaries to audio and video recordings in a variety of genres:

Literature: original writings, recordings, or films produced by native speakers of indigenous languages, in their native languages, including poetry, fiction, and essays. This includes works of oral literature recorded by non-native researchers. We can also publish illustrations that accompany such works.

Educational materials: textbooks, primers, workbooks, etc. We are interested in making multi-media tools for bilingual education and language revitalization available through the archive as well.

Scholarly works: recordings of all kinds, transcriptions, translations, grammars, dictionaries, commentaries, etc. We can also accept books or journal articles whose copyrights have reverted to the author.

Please note: your materials do not have to be perfectly polished and complete to submit them to the archive. You can restrict access to them and update them whenever you choose. We will digitize your materials, making them more useful to you, safeguard your data in our secure database, and make it available to you from any Internet café in the world. Read more about the media that we accept and the digital formats we produce.

Steps in archiving your materials:

1. Consider carefully whether to archive your materials or not.
2. Think about the intellectual property rights of the creators of the materials. Please sign the License Agreement in the AILLA Depositor Packet and return it to us by mail or fax.
3. Fill out the metadata forms in the packet.
4. Package your materials carefully and mail them to us.
5. Log in and view your materials through the Depositor Metadata Editor. This interface also allows you to change and add to the information about your resources.
6. If you have questions about any part of this, please write to us.

1. To archive or not to archive

You should make a considered decision about whether or not to archive your materials. Archiving is permanent - that's one of the advantages - but it may be impossible to retrieve every copy of your work, if you should change your mind in the future. To help you make your decision, read the Top Five Reasons to Archive Your Materials and the Top Five Reasons NOT to Archive Your Materials.

2. Intellectual Property Rights

If you are not the sole creator of the work that you are depositing, you should obtain the informed consent of everyone who participated in creating the materials, if you can. This means that you should ask permission of the speakers, authors, performers, translators, and any other people who contributed significantly to these materials. Ask them if they agree to have their work published at AILLA and made available over the Internet, and how they might want to restrict access to their works. You will have to sign an agreement that licenses AILLA to publish the work on the Internet, make and distribute copies, and use the work for other non-profit purposes. For more information, read the section about Intellectual Property Rights.

3. Metadata: cataloging your materials

Metadata is the information about each resource that is used in searches, such as the language spoken or discussed in the resource, the names of the people who created it, etc. The most important thing to remember in doing your metadata is to keep related items together. Many resources come in bundles, like a recording with transcription and translation files and some photographs of the recorded event. We have to be able to put all the pieces together correctly when we unpack your deposit, so please note all relations among items and label all the items clearly.

4. Sending materials to us

Please label all the materials clearly and pack them carefully, wrapping cassette tapes, compact discs, and diskettes in some sort of padding. If you have done the metadata on paper forms, include them in the package.
Mail it to:

AILLA
c/o Dr. Joel Sherzer
The University of Texas at Austin
Department of Anthropology, EPS 1.130
1 University Station C3200
Austin, Texas 78712-1086
U.S.A.

5. Viewing your materials in the Depositor Metadata Editor

How long it takes for us to process your deposit depends on how busy we are when we receive it and where it falls on our triage schedule:

1. Materials deposited by indigenous people or organizations.
2. Data from extinct or moribund languages.
3. Recordings made on obsolete or fragile media.
4. Support for the goals of speaker communities.
5. Breadth of coverage for some region.
6. Depth of coverage for languages represented in the archive.
7. Quality of supporting materials: metadata, transcriptions, and translations.