A Case Study in Archiving

Last week's New Yorker has a story on the vanishing language of Eyak, spoken by a dwindling group of indigenous people in Alaska. According to Elizabeth Kolbert's report, Marie Smith Jones is the only living speaker of Eyak, and she's 87.
In part of the article, Kolbert writes that a reporter named Laura Bliss Spaan learned of Eyak years ago when she was covering a local festival. She became fascinated with the language and got in touch with the only Eyak linguist, a man named Michael Krauss.
Kolbert writes:

Bliss Spaan arranged for Michael Krauss to give a series of lessons on Eyak grammar, which she videotaped. She then gathered up all the records of the language which she could find -- Krauss's hand-typed dictionary, transcriptions he had made of Eyak legends, audio recordings of an Eyak speaker from the nineteen-seventies, video of Marie Smith Jones -- and computerized them. Altogether, the archive fit on five DVDs. When I arrived in Cordova, Bliss Spaan was there to deliver the archive to the local cultural council. She offered me an extra set of disks that she had brought along. As I took them from her, I had the odd sensation of holding in my hand all that there was -- or ever would be -- of Eyak.

What's so compelling about this archive is that is probably didn't take an unusual amount of skill to create. The papers would be scanned as pdf documents, the recordings would be turned into sound files, and the videos would be digitized. Almost anyone with a small amount of technical expertise or technical help could do it. Rather than skill, the archive needed vision and will -- seeing the culture as valuable and then committing the effort to its preservation. As an archivist, I find this story so inspiring, and I'm going to keep the methodology in mind for the future.
Unfortunately, I'm unable to find Kolbert's story on the web, so I can't link to it. (It's in June 6. The New Yorker with the cover that shows people thinking about housing floor plans. ) I wish prestige magazines like The New Yorker would leave their archives online longer than they do; it seems like it would only garner them more readers in the long run. Though I question whether the Eyak article was ever posted in the first place. But that's a whole 'nother story. (See my previous post on letting the archives run free. )
On a positive note, I did find Kolbert's compelling series on climate change, which includes more of her reporting from Alaska. Part I is here; part II is here; part III is here. Treat yourself: Print them out and bring them with you to the local cafe when you have a couple of hours to spend.