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Top Five Reasons NOT to Archive YourMaterials

1. Privacy is a matter of life and death. If your materials contain information that could seriously endanger the lives of some of the participants, if they should be heard or read by the wrong person, think twice! We make every effort to ensure that no unauthorized person gets access to restricted resources, but it is possible that an authorized person could be careless about the copies that they make. It is also possible that some bad-actor could hack into the computers at the University of Texas at Austin and release all of the restricted files to the world. (It's not likely, because we're not that interesting a target, but it is possible.) You can encode participants' names with the Anonymous keys in the metadata, but if the participant who is in danger can be recognized by their voice, this won't help. Be sure to discuss this possibility with the participants for each resource that you archive, and if there is a real danger, you probably shouldn't send us the materials. If you feel that they really should be archived somehow, write to us and we'll thinkof a solution together.

2. Privacy is a religious or cultural requirement. If your materials are in a sacred form of language, or in a language that should only be learned by tribal members, or the work is a performance that should only be heard or learned by certain persons, you should probably not archive those materials. Our digitizers will listen to all of every recording, although they generally won't understand what they hear. (They will most likely digitize your recordings with the headphones on while doing something else, like entering the metadata or doing their homework.) Also, even resources that are completely restricted are copied, every day and every week, on magnetic backup tapes that are stored in another building for safety. No one listens to these, but still, they are there. If you want to preserve sacred or otherwise highly sensitive materials in a digital format, but don't think you should archive it with AILLA, write to us. We may be able to help you find a way to create your own local archive that is not connected to the Internet, where you can have complete control over who hears or reads your materials.

3. You are planning to publish your work with a traditional institution, like a book publisher, academic journal, or a record company. Many publishers will not want to publish anything that can be heard or read for free on the Internet. On the other hand, they may not mind if you archive primary resources, like recordings and transcriptions, that were used to create the published work. Small local publishers and government institutions, like the Instituto Nacional Indigenista in Mexico, may not mind if you publish your collection of poetry or analyses of oral texts at AILLA in addition to developing a book with them. You should ask the publisher before you send us such materials.

4. You have already published your work. Please don't send us materials that are currently copyrighted to anyone other than yourself, such as a book or journal publishing company. We can wait until that copyright expires and the rights revert to you.

5. Actually, I could only think of 4 reasons for not archiving your materials. If you know of something that should be added to this list, please write!