Archive as Library: Meditations and Actions

Language documentation has been described as the creation of "a lasting, multipurpose record of a language" (Himmelmann 2006:1). These acts of creation and preservation remain the central concern of documentary linguistics to present, as can be seen in the way language documentation is taught, as well as in the ways in which language documentation is funded. What, however, should be done with these language documentations that have been created? One path forward is to reimagine the documentary archive as a library, which is what is proposed in this talk.With the archive reconceived as a library, three documentary deposits familiar to the author (Harvey 2017, 2019, and Griscom and Harvey 2020) and their community contexts will be examined using Ranganathan's (1931) "Five Laws of Library Science". This exercise is used to generate ideas, as well as to frame existing or actionable practices, with the aim of 1) sharing current practices, 2) encouraging imaginative visions of the future, and 3) resisting claims of the creation of "data graveyards" (Newman 2013).