Exploring language archiving education for information professionals and interdisciplinary collaboration to support information access

In the past two decades, federal agencies such as National Science Foundation and Institute for Museum and Library Services have extensively supported efforts aimed at preserving and providing online access to unique and valuable collections of language data. However, multiple studies have demonstrated the gap between the way language data is currently organized and represented in digital archives (mostly by the LIS professionals) and understanding of that data -- and how it should be organized and represented -- by data creators and collectors such as language preservation and revitalization researchers, members of language communities. The specifics of information objects collected by language archives and information needs of these collections' end-users are not currently examined in the LIS education. This paper provides a review of the relevant literature, presents some work of our interdisciplinary team of educators, researchers and practitioners to address this gap, and discusses lessons learned and future directions