Gelao is a seriously endangered language, with only a small group of elderly speakers. Fortunately, these elderly people can still narrate a large amount of oral texts. Based on hard work of language learning and a rudimentary mastery over Gelao, we have so far documented a plenty of oral texts, long or short, recorded by audio or video, all with transcription of IPA and Chinese-English interlinearized (morpheme-morpheme) annotations and free translations.

　　Gelao oral texts are grouped into five registers, namely, story and legends, customs, folk songs, prayers and conversations, presenting their history, culture, values, knowledge and skills of life and labor, as well as their preservation and application of natural environment.

　　Maintaining a good relationship with the local community, experiencing their life, and having suffered all hardships of field work are the prerequisites of obtaining plentiful oral texts. However, to ensure the high quality of the audio file, cooperation and thus audio recording in studio is required of the informants.

　　International standardized formats should be followed and Unicode fonts should be used in processing and editing the recorded data so as to guarantee their future accessibility and applicability.

　　ELAN is a multi-function and powerful software in merging audio and video data with annotations and translations, and thus an efficient tool of documenting and preserving oral cultures.