Design a Digital Archive for Yoruba Oral Poetry Before It Disappears

Yoruba oral poetry traditions, including oriki, ijala, and ewi, are carried by a dwindling number of practitioners, most of them over sixty. University collections exist but are locked behind academic paywalls or stored on deteriorating cassette tapes at institutions like the University of Ibadan. There is no publicly accessible, well-organised repository that a teenager in Lagos, Abuja, or the diaspora can actually use. The problem is not just preservation, it is legibility. Even when recordings exist, they are rarely transcribed, translated, or contextualised for someone who speaks conversational Yoruba but has no grounding in the poetic register. The archive needs to serve two audiences at once: scholars who need rigour, and young people who need a reason to care. Your task is to produce a full product strategy document and a set of annotated wireframes for the archive. The strategy should cover: what content gets prioritised and why, how community contributors (families, local griots, universities) submit and verify material, and how the interface surfaces content in ways that feel engaging rather than museum-like. The wireframes should cover at least five key screens. Good work will name the real constraints: storage costs, language encoding challenges for tonal marks, rights management when oral traditions belong to lineages rather than individuals. It will also propose at least one concrete mechanism for keeping younger users returning, whether that is a short-form audio format, a contribution challenge, or something else entirely.