Presentation for the 2017 Symposium on Developing Infrastructure for Computational Resources on South Asian Languages. This presentation provides an overview of digital preservation collections in the UNT Digital Library.

Video of the opening remarks at the start of the 2017 Symposium on Developing Infrastructure for Computational Resources on South Asian Languages. Cathy Hartman, the interim Dean of UNT Libraries, provides an overview of digital preservation collections in the UNT Digital Library.

This inaugural volume of the CoRSAL Occasional Publications is a collection of traditional and personal texts in Thadou, Saihriem, Hrangkhol, and Ranglong, four languages of the Barak Valley region of Northeast India. The narratives were collected, transcribed, and translated by Dr. Pauthang Haokip, who is an Associate Professor of Linguistics at Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi, India and a member of the Thadou community. This text collection includes grammatical analysis presented in the form of interlinear glossing and accompanied by audio recordings in the Languages of the Barak Valley collection in the Computational Resources of South Asian Languages archive. The collection will be of lasting interest to historical, comparative, and typological linguists, as well as speakers connecting or reconnecting with cultural and linguistic traditions.

This extremely valuable collection of texts in the Lahu language represents the language and culture in the 1960’s, a time when the heritage language and culture were still vibrant and not yet globalized, hence the title Window on a Vanished World. It is also one of the largest collections of texts in any Tibeto-Burman language. The texts are available as a book and online with the audio (originally from 1960’s magnetic tape). This is a massive achievement for all involved in the recording, conversion, and editing.