ABSTRACT
All sociolinguistic interviews should be handled with a long-term storage plan in mind. It is not good enough simply to store researcher files on a lab computer or to back them up to CD/DVD-ROM or a high-capacity external hard drive. These are reasonable and appropriate first steps, but all of these options are ultimately temporary storage: hard drives, optical storage media, and solid state media cards all inevitably fail and are subject to the quality of their original construction and environmental factors. Technology alone cannot produce the optimal recording setup—it must be a mix between researchers equipment and where researcher do the recording. All microphones require an electrical signal to power them. Some of them get their power from battery packs, others from the microphone input on the recorder, and yet others from a dedicated power unit called phantom power.
