Documenting language resources: a foundation for successful stewardship-as-service relationships

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to provide the language collection manager a set of tools and concrete concepts for the assessment and management of audience engagement. Design/methodology/approach This is an original research paper grounded in the cross-disciplinary literature: language documentation, the archival praxis and documentation theory. It seeks to answer the research question: What do students and information professionals tasked with stewarding language resources need to document about their stewardship relationship? Findings There are ambiguous concepts that hold together the Archival Multiverse. Documenting the goals and context of rendered stewardship services clarifies these ambiguities. Originality/value This is the first paper supported by an extensive systematic review of the relevant interdisciplinary literature to address the concerns of Archival Multiverse in the context of archival language collections.