Western Archivists Meeting 2020 (Cancelled due to COVID-19)

Melville Jacobs was an anthropologist and linguist recognized for his fieldwork among Pacific Northwest Native American communities. Made on wax cylinders and instantaneous discs, the recordings document numerous languages, musical practices, and tales. Some document the final speakers of now languages. In 2018 the Library of Congress added the Jacobs Collection to its National Sound Recording Registry.

Vi taqʷšәblu Hilbert was a Native American tribal elder of the Upper Skagit, a tribe of the greater Puget Salish of Washington. Hilbert was also a conservationist of the Lushootseed culture and language, of which she was the last fluent heritage speaker. Her collection contains nine discs and twelve cylinders documenting Lushootseed and other Native American languages that have never been digitized.

With this talk the speakers will describe the contents of these collections, their significance to PNW communities, the way in which the materials have been digitized, the challenges of working with fragile media, approaches to quality control, the ethics of maintaining such collections in archival repositories, and plans for digital repatriation.