Article for a study aimed to develop understanding of the current state of metadata practices in digital collections of archival institutions in the Arabian Gulf region. It also explored perspectives (including attitudes and possible barriers) for development of large-scale regional portals that would facilitate discovery of Arab digital archives (including language collections) by aggregating metadata. It was presented at the 2nd International Workshop on Digital Language Archives held on June 30, 2023 as part of the ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries 2023.

Article explores the training gap between the way these materials are organized and represented and the understanding of that data – and expectations towards the more functional ways of its organization and representation – by language preservation and revitalization researchers, and by members of language communities. Information resources collected by language archives have unique attributes of importance to their target user groups, and these attributes and their representation are not currently widely addressed by the formal training provided to information professionals. It was presented at the 2nd International Workshop on Digital Language Archives held on June 30, 2023 as part of the ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries 2023.<