Calvin Roesler and his wife Ruth spent 43 years (1955-1998) as missionaries in Papua, formerly Irian Jaya, Indonesia. Their work was among the Asmat people in the swamps of the south coast. Linguistic work of devising a spelling system and translation of Scripture was carried out. This included gathering of anthropological data about the culture. Calvin died (in Darwin Australia where they were medivaced) just at the close of their work. Ruth continued the work and is preparing a lexicon of Asmat.

There are 54 of Calvin's tapes in the PARADISEC collection, the great majority are folktales. A few are linguistic in nature, such as words in a frame, verb tense form listings, frames to analyze tone. There are a few of local people singing. Some are from western melodies and others are with indigenous melodies, especially the various types of song and the environment in which they are sung (such as the song for certain type of feasts). All of the tapes have information both on the back of the box as well as on papers included in the box.

In addition, Ruth Roesler still has bound copies of the Master's thesis, 'The Phonology of the Ayam Dialect of Asmat, a pedagogical grammar' in first draft, various unpublished papers on specific aspects of the language, and the New Testament in Asmat, which was published by the Indonesian Bible Society in 1985.

At one stage, Calvin Roesler sent material to Indiana University to be stored in microfiche form, this has not yet been located by our project.