We created Archiving the Present as a practical guide to documenting and archiving community stories, voices, and knowledge, in mother tongues and local languages. It exists because oral knowledge is still treated as inferior to written knowledge. Most human knowledge has always been oral. The manual covers planning a documentation project, recording audio and video, managing files, preparing metadata, publishing, archiving, fundraising, and the ethics of consent and payment.
The manual grew out of a three-month online workshop series, running from 18 May to 24 August 2026 and closing with an in-person session in Kochi, Kerala, alongside WikiConference India. Nearly 20 trainers from seven countries across Asia, Africa, Europe, and Latin America led bilingual sessions. Each covered their own part of the documentation and archiving process. Each module was built from a trainer’s own outline, then filled in from the transcript of what they actually said in session: it is their knowledge, in their own voices. Around 104 documenters applied to take part, wanting to document well over a hundred languages between them, including many Adivasi and other tribal languages of India.
Ganesh Birua, Ramjit Tudu and Shalini A
Helps plan your language documentation around your own community’s motivations. You will write a simple plan: what is missing, who your collaborators are, and which stories, words, or songs you will record. The plan also says why the work matters, what its goal is, and where the recordings will live safely for the long term.
Taukeer Alam, Anju Gagrai, Opino Gomango and Puthiya Purayil Sneha
Explains how informed consent, rights, FAIR and CARE-based ethics, and payment work together in community language documentation. By the end, you should be able to ask for consent properly and respect community and individual rights. You should also be able to plan for fair payment and recognition of labour.
Pius Akumbu and Amrit Sufi
Helps you record clear, honest audio and video with the tools you already have, in ways that respect people’s comfort and safety.
Deepak Kumar Beshra, Amrit Sufi and Subhashish Panigrahi
Helps you organise your audio and video, keep them safe, and do basic editing. Your recordings are then ready for sharing, archiving, and future use.
Yulha Lhawa, Abu Sayeed and Subhashish Panigrahi
Explains what media and metadata are, and how to prepare both for archives, libraries, and other memory institutions. It builds on Module 4, which covered getting files into good shape. Archives do not expect perfection: they expect clear file names, clear descriptions, and clear access rules.
Eddie Avila, Mithilesh Baraily and Mariana Fossatti
Explains why publishing matters, who should be involved, and simple ways to share language recordings and texts safely and usefully.
Smita Khator, Ritu Sharma and Sanjib Chaudhary
Sees an archive as an ongoing practice that serves your community in the present, not a one-time act that preserves the past. By the end, you should be able to name one thing beyond a word list worth documenting in your community. You should also be able to explain why a recording’s context matters as much as the recording itself.
Mandana Seyfeddinipur
Covers two practical skills every community documenter needs: funding language documentation and understanding how institutional archiving works. By the end, you should be able to name at least one route to funding and outline what depositing with an archive involves. You should also be able to explain why “one archive, one platform” cannot serve every community the same way.
OpenSpeaks
A guide to writing down spoken words: as captions on screen, as subtitles in another language, or as a full transcript. Captions are in the language actually spoken, mainly for deaf and hard-of-hearing viewers. Subtitles translate them into another language, and transcripts are plain documents without time codes.
Subhashish Panigrahi, Opino Gomango and Kimmi Pal
For anyone archiving oral knowledge: how to plan a recording, agree with a community on what happens to it, and document that process. It builds on OpenSpeaks Archives’ earlier work, a 2024–2025 pilot, a 2025–2026 implementation phase, and case study analysis.
Followed by a Glossary of terms. Edited by Arky AR, Puthiya Purayil Sneha and Subhashish Panigrahi.