Electronic libraries: National Anthropological Archives to digitize unique Native Americans’ manuscripts

The Smithsonian’s National Anthropological Archives has received a $323,000 “Save America’s Treasures” grant from the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities. The grant will ensure long-term preservation and better access to the Archives’ endangered-languages manuscripts.

The National Anthropological Archives is the nation’s principal repository of original documentation for spoken, endangered and extinct Native American languages. Approximately 250 American Indian languages are represented in the collection. For many of these languages documentation exists nowhere else. The collection traces its origin to an 1879 Act of Congress creating an official repository for documents concerning American Indians. The cultural and historical value of the collection is inestimable. It includes vocabularies, grammars, lexicons, synonymies, texts and narratives of endangered languages.  The collections are used each year by more than 600 on-site academic researchers as well as by Native Americans for whom these primary documents are key to understanding their language, culture and history. The preservation of at-risk items and digitization for online access will broaden access to endangered language materials with unparalleled research value and cultural relevance.