Sharing archives: A test case with Zotero

Presented by Claire Bowern and Seth Katenkamp at the Language Documentation and Archiving Conference, Berlin & Online, 4-6 Sept, 2024. Language documentation collections are often heterogeneous, with many genres, collectors, time periods, communities and formats. This creates challenges for archiving and the larger the collection, the more difficult organization can be. Such collections must also be accessible to community members who also use materials in many different ways (Burke et al 2021, 2022). Additional challenges are created when collections are under continued development and in active use for research and education. Bird & Simons’ (2003) dimensions of “portability” include adequate citation, sharing, and searchability, in addition to long-term storage. In this talk, we explore Zotero (zotero.org) as a partial solution to these issues. Zotero is open source bibliographic software for storing, cataloguing, and sharing bibliographic items. It has a prespecified and user-entered metadata options. Reference collections can be public or restricted, and the digital primary sources can be stored and shared in multiple formats. It is fully searchable and uses a combination of folders, tags, relationship definitions, and free-text for organization and searchability. Users can annotate records or items and collaboratively upload materials; these can be hosted through WebDAV or elsewhere. Zotero is not recommended for long-term preservation (that is, it does not replace digital archives) but for working with collections under active development from multiple sources, it is a stable and promising resource (cf. LOCKSS; Bird & Simons 2003). We illustrate this talk with examples from a collection under active development (language redacted for anonymity). Items are organized in primary folders by genre (stories, fieldnotes, songs, school-materials, publications, dictionary) and secondarily by researcher. Items can be filtered by speaker and are tagged for attributes. Materials from the same session (e.g. audio, transcript) are linked. Zotero’s ability to export annotations on pdfs has also been a welcome way to link photographs of handwritten fieldnotes with digital materials in other formats.