Further helpful information
A number of other initiatives have been undertaken in recent years which provide advice,
training, and support for linguists interested in language documentation and description,
and many of these have developed web sites containing useful information on topics not covered here.
Below, we give some of these sites, along with a brief description.
The E-MELD School of Best Practices in Language Documentation: A web site covering a wide range
of topics in language documentation, with a focus on its technological aspects, including
discussion of hardware and software tools for language documentation and encoding standards
for digital linguistic resources.
The Hans Rausing Endangered Languages Project:
The Rausing Project is a large-scale initiative with three components: a language documentation
program, which funds documentation projects throughout the world; an academic program,
which trains students to do documentary work; and a digital archive for storing endangered languages data.
Its website contains both information specific to the project as well as general information and advice for documentary linguists.
The DoBeS Project:
The DoBeS project funds research on endangered languages and runs an endangered language archive
based at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen. Among other things,
it has developed a number of tools for language documentation and metadata standards for the archiving of digital linguistic resources.
Paradisec:
The Pacific and Regional Archive for Digital Sources in Endangered Cultures (Paradisec) web site
contains a page of links covering a number of areas of potential interest to documentary and descriptive linguists,
with a focus on sites related to digital archiving.
AILLA:
The Archive of the Indigenous Languages of Latin America (AILLA) web site contains a page of links
covering a number of areas of potential interest to documentary and descriptive linguists, including
links to information about intellectual property rights, linguistic archives, and funding organizations.
The Endangered Language Fund:
The Endangered Language Fund provides grants to projects involving endangered languages.
Its website contains links to a number of other projects relevant to the study of endangered languages.
The Foundation for Endangered Languages:
The Foundation for Endangered Languages seeks to raise awareness of endangered language issues
and supports the documentation and revitalization of endangered languages.
Its website contains links to a number of other projects relevant to the study of endangered languages.
SIL Electronic Survey Reports:
Online access to SIL's sociolinguistic surveys, conducted by SIL teams all over the world.
Many of the surveys include the questionnaires used to conduct the surveys.
Burgel R.M. Faehndrich, a Ph.D. student at the University of Hawaii, has made a useful
 checklist
of items that may be useful for fieldwork.
The list provides many valuable suggestions that should be considered before a field trip. It is especially useful for inexperienced field workers.
UNICODE - Orthographies for Unwritten Languages - Recommendations:
When linguists and user communities are devising a new orthography for a language-or even trying
to come up with a single new character for a phoneme-it is particularly helpful to select new
symbols (or letters) that can be used easily on the computer. In this way, written materials
can be made available quickly to others in electronic format, such as on web pages or in
word processing documents, without the users needing to download special fonts, or have any
specialized software. It should be considered a long-term disservice to users to saddle users
with an orthography that does not work on today's computers. The suggestions on the Unicode website
are intended to provide advice on which characters will be easier-or more difficult-to implement
on computer systems that support Unicode, the widely supported international character encoding standard.
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