Open Archive
Recording endangered languages and crafts properly, with rights kept by the communities they came from.
11
Languages
18,000
Archive items
240
Apprenticeships
Open
Default access
Why it works the way it does.
Documentation projects have a poor record of returning anything to the people documented. Recordings end up in an institution, under a licence the community never saw.
Open Archive inverts that. Communities hold the rights; we provide recording, cataloguing, hosting and backup, and the archive is publicly accessible unless the community asks otherwise.
Alongside it we pay master practitioners to train successors, because a craft survives through earnings, not through footage.
The design decisions.
- 01Community holds rights; the Foundation holds no exclusive licence
- 02Professional recording, cataloguing, hosting and offsite backup
- 03Paid apprenticeships alongside documentation
- 04Public access by default, restricted only at community request
Partners on the ground.
- Community linguists
- State cultural departments
- University partners
This initiative sits inside Arts, culture and heritage.
11
Languages
18,000
Archive items
240
Apprenticeships
Open
Default access
Fund Open Archive, or something like it.
We will tell you exactly what a contribution covers, what it does not, and what we will report back to you and when.
