This paper reports on challenges and solution approaches in the development of methods for language resource overarching data analysis in the field of language documentation. It is based on the successful outcomes of the initial phase of an 18 year long-term project on lesser resourced and mostly endangered indigenous languages of the Northern Eurasian area, which included the finalization and publication of multiple language corpora and additional language resources. While aiming at comprehensive cross-resource data analysis, the project at the same time is confronted with a dynamic and complex resource landscape, especially resulting from a vast amount of multi-layered information stored in the form of analogue primary data in different widespread archives on the territory of the Russian Federation. The methods described aim at solving the tension between unification of data sets and vocabularies on the one hand and maximum openness for the integration of future resources and adaption of external information on the other hand.

This contribution presents the background, design and results of a study of users of three oral corpus platforms in Germany. Roughly 5.000 registered users of the Database for Spoken German (DGD), the GeWiss corpus and the corpora of the Hamburg Centre for Language Corpora (HZSK) were asked to participate in a user survey. This quantitative approach was complemented by qualitative interviews with selected users. We briefly introduce the corpus resources involved in the study in section 2. Section 3 describes the methods employed in the user studies. Section 4 summarizes results of the studies focusing on selected key topics. Section 5 attempts a generalization of these results to larger contexts.