The DELAMAN Award recognizes and honours early-career documenters who have done outstanding documentary work in creating and archiving a rich multimedia documentary collection of a particular language that is endangered or no longer spoken. “Early-career” is defined as
(a) a university-based documenter with a PhD awarded 01 January 2017 or later; or
(b) non-university-based documenters who have been employed by or affiliated with a language-community-based project since no earlier than 01 January 2017.
If an entire team of documenters is nominated, all nominees must meet this definition of "early-career." Self-nomination is permitted and encouraged.
To be eligible, the language documentation collection must be archived and made accessible in a DELAMAN archive (with no or only minimal access restrictions), and it must provide rich audio and video documentation, keywords, comprehensive metadata, and explanatory material or guides, as well as transcription, translation and annotation of a subset of the AV collection.