This award provides funds to rescue the National Archive of the Albanian Lexicon, which has been undergoing severe physical deterioration since the end of the Communist regime in 1991. The archive, consisting of an estimated 5,000,000 data cards, was created under extraordinary political and linguistic circumstances that can never be reproduced, and its loss would be irreparable and deleterious for any future study of the language and to studies that call upon contemporary, historical, comparative, or dialectal Albanian data. The rescue begins with capture of the data cards as scanned images onto CD ROM disks. Duplicate disks will be brought to the University of California, San Diego, for transfer into permanent electronic form. After the images are indexed, the duplicate archive will be generally available for scholarly purposes.
