An Exploration of Contributor-Created Description Field in Participatory Archives

Collaborating with Language Community Members to Enrich Ethnographic Descriptions in a Language Archive

“…More recently, [6] recommend for language documenters to discuss language communities' unmet needs during the documentation process, and work with language archives to make collections accessible despite the target community's specific barriers to access (e.g., minimal internet access). Recent work in this area has noted the integral role that community engagement and rich contextual descriptions play in facilitating access to archival materials [7,8,9,10]. Through discussions of the ethics of appropriating materials and framing community stories in non-community perspectives, many have called for increased involvement of language communities in the archiving process [11,12].…”

Descriptive richness of free‐text metadata: A comparative analysis of three language archives

“…Metadata creators were able to provide more detailed information in the free‐text Description field than was possible through controlled vocabularies alone, demonstrating that the combination of free‐text and controlled‐vocabulary metadata elements provides richer access (Zavalina, 2014). Another investigation of archival descriptions created by contributors (Roeschley et al, 2020) finds additional contextual information not seen in cataloguer‐created metadata, though context may take precedence over the content. Although language archive metadata is also created by contributors (researchers), inadequate contextual information was found to cause frustration for language archive users (Wasson, Holton, & Roth, 2016), suggesting a need for adjustment to the use of the Description field.…”

“…), and free‐text metadata. While it is well‐known that controlled‐vocabulary metadata supports information discovery, the free‐text metadata, in particular the Dublin Core metadata field Description and its equivalents in other schemes (e.g., Abstract, Note, and Table of Contents in MODS) have been found to add substantial value to metadata records by providing rich contextual information (Roeschley, Kim, & Zavalina, 2020; Tarver, Zavalina, & Phillips, 2016; Zavalina, Palmer, Jackson, & Han, 2008).…”