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Academic fieldwork data collections are often unique and unrepeatable records of highly significant events collected at considerable expense of researcher time, effort and resources. While fieldworkers have been quick to take advantage of digital technologies to enable them to collect and organise their data, standards and workflows are only now beginning to emerge to assist researchers to submit their data for archiving and access. This collection of refereed papers from the conference of the same name held at the University of Sydney in December 2006 provides a record of recent research practice by fieldworkers in linguistics, botany and anthropology, and by archive and repository managers.

Linda Barwick is a musicologist collaborating with First Nations communities in Australia since 1985 and Italian communities since 1979. She is currently Emeritus Professor at the University of Sydney, Sydney Conservatorium of Music.

Nicholas Thieberger is an Australian Research Council Future Fellow at the University of Melbourne.

1. Sustainable data from digital fieldwork: the state of the art (Sydney, 2006)
Linda Barwick

Part 1: fieldwork to archive
2. Issues in the creation of a digital archive of a signed language
Trevor Johnston and Adam Schembri
3. Powerless in the field: a cautionary tale of digital dependencies
Tom Honeyman
4. Archiving directly from the field
Laura Robinson
5. From trees to descriptions and identification tools
Barry Conn and Kipiro Damas

Part 2: best practice?
6. When best practice isn't necessarily the best thing to do: dealing with capacity limits in a developing country
John Bowden and John Hajek
7. Proficient, permanent or pertinent: aiming for sustainability
David Nathan
8. Finding the locus of best practice: technology training in an Alaskan language community
Andrea Berez and Gary Holton
9. E-MELD and the School of Best Practices: an ongoing community effort
Jessica Boynton, Steve Moran, Anthony Aristar and Helen Aristar-Dry

Part 3: tools and repositories
10. EOPAS, the EthnoER online representation of interlinear text
Ronald Schroeter and Nicholas Thieberger
11. The Annodex platform (2006)
Shane Stephens
12. Archiving and sharing data using XML
Simon Musgrave
13. Sowing seeds in the digital garden
Murray Henwood, Susan Hanfling, Rowan Brownlee, Belinda Pellow and Tristan Gutsche

Part 4: beyond the repository
14. Past, present and future in Reefs-Santa Cruz research
Åshild Næss
15. Field, file, data, conference: towards new modes of scholarly publication
Ross Coleman