It's a Big World After All ...the pitfalls of digitizing and describing a linguistics project by non-linguists

A digitized collection of linguistics recordings made by Jimmy G. Harris, a former employee of the United Nations who worked for several decades in many far-flung parts of the world. The recordings are unique, capturing languages and dialects from speakers in currently politically unstable countries where field work is difficult if not impossible. Furthermore, since the recordings were made from the 1960s to the 1980s, they also represent a unique capture of these speakers during a specific time. Adding this digital collection to our institutional repository posed some unique challenges, including reel to reel capture of sound from materials that were decades old and metadata creation without a certain type of specialization.