ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews several of the issues involved in preserving and maintaining access to sociolinguistic data. It focuses on data storage and management, only touching on issues of ethics and rights management. The chapter also focuses on the language documentation and description literature, where the details of data preservation and access have been considered to great depth. In discussing the preservation of sociolinguistic recordings, it seems fitting to begin with the fact that many legacy materials have proven invaluable to sociolinguistic study. Numerous websites and documents provide detailed descriptions of the digitization process and how one can achieve the best-quality results. Solid-state digital recorders have become the recording device of choice for many sociolinguistic fieldworkers, and most sociolinguistic recordings are completely digital. Much audio and video recording was done on analog devices, such as cassette tape, and even cylinder- and disc-based phonograph devices.
