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
“This module helps you plan your language documentation around your own community’s motivations.”
Taukeer Alam, Anju Gagrai, Opino Gomango and Puthiya Purayil Sneha
“This module explains how informed consent, rights, FAIR and CARE-based ethical practice, and payment work together in community language documentation.”
Pius Akumbu and Amrit Sufi
“This module aims to help 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
“This module is to help you organise your audio and video simply, keep them safe, and do basic editing so your recordings are ready for sharing, archiving, and future use.”
Yulha Lhawa, Abu Sayeed and Subhashish Panigrahi
“This module is to help you understand what media and metadata are, and prepare both so that archives, libraries, and other memory institutions can work with the material you collect.”
Eddie Avila, Mithilesh Baraily and Mariana Fossatti
“This module 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
“This module does not see an archive as a one-time act that preserves the past. Instead, it sees it as an ongoing practice that serves your community in the present.”
Mandana Seyfeddinipur
“This module is to help you understand how to fund language documentation work and how institutional archiving works, as two practical skills every community documenter needs.”
OpenSpeaks
“This guide is for writing down spoken words in language documentation: as captions on screen, as subtitles in another language, or as a full written transcript.”
Subhashish Panigrahi, Opino Gomango and Kimmi Pal
“This framework is for anyone archiving oral knowledge: how to plan a recording, how to work with a community to discuss and agree on what happens to it, and how to document that process itself.”
Followed by a Glossary of terms. Edited by Arky AR, Puthiya Purayil Sneha and Subhashish Panigrahi.