The National Museum of Natural History has announced a $1 million grant from the London-based Arcadia Fund to digitize endangered-language materials currently housed in the museum's National Anthropological Archives.

The funds will help support the first two years of the museum's efforts to digitize its entire collection — an estimated three thousand hours of ethnographic sound recordings and thirty-five thousand pages of manuscript materials representing every continent except Antarctica — as part of the Recovering Voices initiative, an interdisciplinary effort to study, document, and enliven endangered languages and cultures. As part of the effort, the archives' unparalleled collection of primary sources will be made available to the public through the Smithsonian's online and openly accessible catalog system.

One of the core objectives of Recovering Voices is to engage anthropologists, biologists, linguists, and other researchers in exploring the links between language, traditional knowledge, and the environment. According to the museum, experts estimate that more than 50 percent of the world's living languages will cease to be spoken by the end of this century and that, as a result, the ability to confront worldwide environmental challenges will be diminished. The digitization project aims to preserve this knowledge, which currently is recorded on materials at substantial risk of degrading.

"Digitization of these materials within the NAA will give both scholars and local communities new access to documentation of endangered languages and cultural knowledge about threatened environments around the world, ranging from southern California to small Micronesian atolls," said Recovering Voices director Joshua Bell. "The NAA collections are also a major Smithsonian resource supporting Recovering Voices' work to document and revitalize endangered languages and knowledge systems on a global scale."