I have been noticing that some of the important sites in the US universities for learning Quechua and Aymara, languages of the South-American Andean highlands, are no longer accessible. I shall mention the two that particularly impacted me, but there could be more.
(1) Digital Resources for the Study of Quechua (hosted by the University of California Los Angeles, UCLA)
This website had made accessible the material Quechua Live and in Color! developed by the team of Roger W. Andersen and others (formerly: http://quechua.ucla.edu).
(2) Aymara on the Web (hosted by the University of Florida, UFL)
A digital re-adaptation of the products from the Aymara Language Materials Program which was led by Martha J. Hardman in the 1960s-70s (formerly: http://aymara.ufl.edu/). The dialogues and exercises from the student manual Aymara ar yatiqañataki had been put on-line, with the dialogues by the Aymara speakers.
The leaders of these projects have left the universities, and this may
have been the main reason behind the closure of these sites. However, these materials have their on-going and historical significance. On-going in the sense that they would still help the new learners with additional and complementary learning materials. Historical in the sense that they occupy an important position in the history of development of learning materials in these languages, and should be left available for the analysis and scrutiny of a new generation of researchers. Despite other new and innovative materials now being made available on the web (for example Ciberaymara http://www.ilcanet.org/ciberaymara/contenidos/), past materials do not lose their importance.
From this perspective, I would like to strongly urge both the University of California Los Angeles and University of Florida to assume their historic and social responsibility to make these learning materials accessible again, and to maintain that accessibility.
