Creating grass roots digital Coeur d’Alene resources: the COLRC

Abstract

The Coeur d’Alene Online Language Resource Center (COLRC) is a digital archive that interfaces with the World Wide Web via a series of websites that make accessible many of the known Coeur d’Alene language resources for scholarly and educational purposes. Following the best practices outlined in the TAPS Checklist (Chang 2010) and Bird and Simons (2003), a team of linguists, community members, and a computer engineer developed the resources (at minimal cost) building on the grass roots model outlined in Bischoff and Fountain (2013). The COLRC contains over 1,200 pages of unpublished field-notes and manuscripts recording Coeur d’Alene myths, tales, and histories. Additionally, it includes a searchable Coeur d’Alene/English root dictionary, affix list, and stem list, along with a number of audio recordings and other language resources. This paper presents elements of the COLRC and the questions derived from the best practices that shaped it.