Indigenous librarianship is a distinct field of librarianship that brings Indigenous approaches to areas such as knowledge organization, collection development, library and information services, language and cultural practices, and education. [1] The Encyclopedia of Library and Information Sciences (3rd ed.) states that Indigenous librarianship emerged as a "distinct field of practice and an arena for international scholarship in the late twentieth century bolstered by a global recognition of the value and vulnerability of Indigenous knowledge systems, and of the right of Indigenous peoples to control them." [2]
Indigenous librarianship is supported by a number of professional associations, a growing body of research, and both professional and educational initiatives. Indigenous librarianship can be practised by both Indigenous and non-Indigenous librarians [3] and exists all over the world, including across Aotearoa (New Zealand), [4] Australia, [5] Hawai'i, [4] Sápmi (Northern Europe and Russia), [6] South America, [7] Sudan, [8] Turtle Island (North America), [2] and Udmurtia. [9] To date, the largest centres of activity for Indigenous librarianship are in Aotearoa and in what are now known as Australia, Canada, and the United States. [1]
Indigenous librarianship prioritizes the interests, practices, needs, and support of Indigenous peoples. Indigenous culture and concerns are therefore used to guide and implement library and information practices, as well as to ensure that the practices of Indigenous librarianship advance Indigenous interests, such as sovereignty and self-determination. [1] Frameworks such as the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) are other key mechanisms for ensuring that practice and research are ethical and for centring Indigenous rights. For example, using appropriate and respectful cultural protocols for the handling of Indigenous knowledge, including traditional knowledge, is one way Indigenous librarianship is practised.
Indigenous Librarianship can contrast with or be in conflict with non-Indigenous librarianship practices and research, which are often heavily influenced by colonialism. As Indigenous librarianship is connected to the advancement of Indigenous rights it has been deemed to be one of the more political forms of librarianship. [10]
In North America librarians are typically expected to have a master's degree from a program accredited by the ALA. Some universities offer specialized programs in Indigenous librarianship. The University of British Columbia offers a First Nation Curriculum Concentration for both their Master of Archival Studies and Master of Library and Information Studies. [11] At the University of Arizona School of Information, M.A. Library and Information Science students can apply to the Knowledge River Program, which focuses on the information needs of Latino, Native American and Black communities. [12] In 2021, the Bridging Knowledge program was announced, which will support 15 American Indian, Alaska Native, and Native Hawaiian students in earning their Masters of Library and Information Science through San José State University School of Information. [13]
Other educational bodies and programs related to Indigenous librarianship and Indigenous knowledge practices include:
Indigenous peoples hold unique languages and ways of knowing, often including their relationship to and stewardship of their lands. According to the United Nations (UN), there are "more than 476 million Indigenous peoples living in all regions of the world" and the UN emphasizes the importance of understanding the term Indigenous to be based on "self-identification as Indigenous peoples" at both individual and community levels. As such, no single official definition of the term Indigenous has been adopted by the UN. [24] Moreover, the term Indigenous is not acceptable to all peoples and there are many other terms that may be used instead of, or alongside, the term Indigenous by individuals, communities, or groups.
The International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA) reflects a similar approach to understanding the term Indigenous as that of the UN. IFLA chose to adopt Loriene Roy's stance that "Indigenous people know who they are" [25] rather than trying to define Indigenous peoples monolithically.
Indigenous librarianship recognizes the need to protect Indigenous ways of knowing. It resists colonizing and other oppressive practices that historically and currently exclude Indigenous knowledges or push them to the margins in institutions such as libraries. Moreover, due to these same forces of colonization and oppression, Indigenous individuals and their expertise are often drastically underrepresented in LIS professions. [26] [3]
Part of the work of Indigenous librarianship is to create more space and advocate for Indigenous peoples within Indigenous librarianship itself, and in the field of LIS more broadly. [26] [3] Indigenous librarianship also works to ensure that Indigenous peoples have access to information organizations that accurately and respectfully reflect their cultures, knowledges, and protocols.
There are several libraries throughout the world that focus on serving Indigenous communities and that centre Indigenous knowledge practices. These include:
A number of national and international professional associations, organizations, and committees exist that support and otherwise intersect with the work of Indigenous librarianship.
Compared with Knowledge Organization (KO), Indigenous Knowledge Organization (IKO) includes methodologies through which Indigenous peoples create protocols to help name, articulate, collate, and make accessible objects that indicate Indigenous knowledge. [68]
One of the main criticisms that IKO scholars offer of existing KO practices is that traditional means of cataloguing and classifying knowledge result in the marginalization, omission, or misrepresentation of Indigenous topics. [69] IKO scholars argue for the limitations of traditional classification systems used in the library workplace. In particular, the widely used Library of Congress Classification (LCC), Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH), and the Dewey Decimal System (DDC) schemes have been criticized for lacking terminology and categories specific to Indigenous Peoples and for ignoring the presence of localized epistemological schemes. For example, LCC has been criticized for using insensitive, outdated terms, such as its subject heading of "Indians of North America", and for failing to offer nuance for referring to varied Indigenous groups, such as First Nations, Inuit and Metis peoples. [70]
Another key criticism made by IKO scholars is that, aside from erasure, current means of organizing materials of Indigenous peoples often reproduce Western disciplinary assumptions that risk ‘othering’ Indigenous communities in binary opposition to Western counterparts. [71] These systems can “silence” the heterogeneity of Indigenous peoples and push aside practices that test for cultural appropriateness of classification, curriculum, and pedagogy. [72] For example, under many Western schemes, Native Knowledge is frequently and incorrectly classified under ‘American History’, thus erasing the visibility of Indigenous history and making it seem as if Indigenous peoples are historical groups subsumed by Western history, rather than presenting them as the actively living, autonomous, modern cultures that they are. [73]
There are a variety of alternative KO systems developed in response to the critiques offered by IKO scholars. For example, the University of Hawaii spearheaded the KVJ Law Classification Project in order to provide Indigenous legal expertise in re-classifying law materials. [74] The Brian Deer Classification System is a specialized classification system for Indigenous materials. A modified version of the Brian Deer Classification System serves as the X̱wi7x̱wa Classification Scheme at the University of British Columbia's X̱wi7x̱wa Library. The National Library of New Zealand uses the Ngā Upoko Tukutuku (subject headings in te reo Māori) to better reflect Māori terminology and concepts relevant to the Māori community. [75]
Other examples of IKO systems include:
Given the wide geographic reach of Indigenous librarianship, and the diversity of Indigenous peoples who either are undertaking or are impacted by this work, there can be no universal protocols for Indigenous librarianship. [85] Instead, these protocols must be established locally. However, Indigenous scholars Sandra Littletree, Miranda Belarde-Lewis, and Marisa Duarte point to the prominent role of relationality between living people, lands, objects, ancestors, and future generations across many iterations of Indigenous librarianship and frame this as a crucial feature of Indigenous librarianship praxis. [86]
As a praxis, Indigenous librarianship is attuned to the ways in which knowledge cannot be separated from its relationships with people, places, objects, and the rest of its ecology. As described by Alissa Cherry and Keshav Mukunda, "Indigenous knowledge systems are characterized by their holistic view of the world, in particular this means that knowledge cannot be separated from the individual or group holding it." [87] The role of relationality is also evident, for example, in Deborah Lee's articulation of the three Rs of doing Indigenous research in LIS, namely, respect, reciprocity, and relationality. [88] Other expressions of this relationality can be traced through Loriene Roy's assertion that Indigenous librarianship places "less emphasis on tools than on the relationships between people and their connections to traditional knowledge", [89] in Jessie Loyer's explication of practices of kinship within Indigenous information literacy practices, [90] and Alison Krebs' statement that "as Indigenous peoples we exist within dynamic and interactive webs of relationship governed by mutual respect, reciprocity, and relational accountability”. [91]
This relationality means that "Indigenous peoples often remark that you cannot separate the part from the whole". [92] Conversely, such a separation is often a characteristic of non-Indigenous LIS practices, including cataloguing and the conceptual and physical separation of libraries, archives, museums, and other places of cultural memory and heritage from each other. [92] Furthermore, the praxis of Indigenous librarianship differs from "the broader field of library and information science" in that it shifts focus from "principles of controlled vocabulary, specificity, literary warrant, coherence and standardization, and moving from the general to the specific in subject categorization" in favour of a "more community-based approach, namely, a relational approach," which, in turn, gives rise more holistically to protocols and modes of knowledge exchange. [93]
Numerous protocols and standards exist for Indigenous communities throughout the world. These protocols act as best practices for an organization when dealing with Indigenous Peoples and materials and include the following:
Indigenous intellectual and cultural property rights approach the concepts of intellectual and cultural property from a non-Western view point. The intent is to protect Indigenous knowledge and works from being exploited or appropriated within other media or by cultural institutions. The proclivity to share knowledge is not equivalent to allowing this knowledge to be appropriated. For example, open-access information, including the automatic legal transference of intellectual property into the public domain, are highly valued in many fields of LIS, but it is important to recognize the role of European intellectual property laws and practices in such ideas of openness and publicity. As articulated by Indigenous scholars, including Greg Younging, these intellectual laws and their resulting concepts are often at odds with Indigenous knowledges, which can include specific protocols guiding how, when, and to whom certain knowledge should be passed. [105] These laws also overlook the ways in which Indigenous knowledges have historically been violently extracted, appropriated, and used for profit or other gain by non-Indigenous individuals and groups before being made 'open' knowledge. Examples of works that have appropriated Indigenous works include Deep Forest. [106]
A major effort in protecting Indigenous Intellectual and Cultural Property has been the development of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Protocols for Libraries, Archives and Information Services. These Protocols are intended to help Indigenous works be managed in a way that is culturally appropriate. The Protocols were published in 1995 by the Australian Library and Information Association (ALIA).The Protocols provide guides to libraries on ways to manage Indigenous works in their collections. [107] These protocols also focus on providing Indigenous communities with more pathways to employment in information fields in an attempt to help reclaim sovereignty over Intellectual and Cultural Property dispersion. [108]
The United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) was a further step in providing coverage and protections for Indigenous Intellectual and Cultural Property. UNDRIP isn't a legally binding ratification, but instead a framework that can be used to guide institutions toward giving more control to Indigenous people over their works. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada directly referenced the UNDRIP in its Calls to Action in an attempt to allow Indigenous works in archives to be more accessible to the communities in which they originated. [106]
The rights of Indigenous peoples to hold autonomy over their knowledges are articulated within UNDRIP through the following Articles:
Digital repatriation (or virtual repatriation) is the returning of digital copies of cultural heritage items, such as recordings, documents, and images, to the originating community. [110] In an Indigenous context, this involves returning Indigenous cultural expressions to the relevant Indigenous community. [111] As cultural memory institutions increasingly digitize their collections, [112] Indigenous communities may be involved with determining descriptions for, and controlling access to, digital objects. [113] Institutions may also repatriate collection and object rights to Indigenous communities. These materials may form a local knowledge base, requiring digital knowledge organization systems that can accommodate Indigenous cultural protocols. [111] Such efforts at repatriation have prompted software development specifically for this purpose. [114]
Library and Archives Canada (LAC) created the Indigenous Heritage Action Plan in 2019 in response to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. [115] The action plan affirms the rights of Indigenous peoples as laid out in UNDRIP and contains 28 concrete actions that will be undertaken by LAC. [115] These actions include: increasing Indigenous community engagement with LAC, seeking the council of an Elder-In-Residence, following Indigenous cultural protocols, increased partnerships with Indigenous communities regarding the loaning of documents, utilizing crowdsourcing software to allow for Indigenous people to contribute knowledge to digital collections, examining Indigenous-led access management of some LAC collections, such as those created from Indigenous knowledge, and collaborating with Indigenous communities to preserve non-governmental archival records according to the preferences of the community, whether at LAC or locally. [115]
In 2010, the Reciprocal Research Network (RRN) was launched as a partnership between the Museum of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia, the Musqueam Indian Band, the Stó:lō Nation/Tribal Council, and the U’mista Cultural Society. [116] The RRN is an online tool that contains digital copies of Indigenous objects from the Northwest coast of British Columbia held at 29 institutions. [117] The RRN allows for collaborative research between members and allows members to create their own projects using objects from many different holding institutions. [118] Each co-developer has a member in the steering group, allowing them to contribute to decisions regarding the platform's scope, schedule, and budget. [116]
Indigenous collection development focuses on providing culturally relevant library resources by, for, and with Indigenous people. [119] Generally, the criteria for planning and building library collections are guided by collection development policies aimed at addressing the needs of a library's users. [120] In Indigenous contexts collection development practices and policies aim to provide barrier free access to culturally relevant materials for the communities they serve, [121] which can range from Indigenous community libraries to Indigenous collections within public libraries. To give some examples, the First Nations University of Canada library collection policy focuses primarily on the materials written by, for, and about the First Nations, Inuit, and Métis peoples of Canada; [122] the Blackfoot Digital Library is dedicated to creating a Blackfoot-centric collection; [123] the New South Wales (NSW) State Library Indigenous Collecting Strategy broadly serves to focus on "developing its collections of material created by Indigenous people, who have contributed, and continue to contribute, to the life of NSW and its communities." [124] Additionally, Indigenous collection development may be guided by Indigenous protocols that address the specific, local needs of Indigenous communities. For example, the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies ( AIATSIS) collection is guided by the AIATSIS Collection Development Policy [125] as well as Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Library Information and Resource Network (ATSILIRN) Protocols for Libraries, Archives and Information Services. [126] Though Indigenous collection development strategies are defined by the specific library contexts and communities they serve, some shared considerations emerge across diverse Indigenous collection development processes:
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Indigenous librarianship is a distinct field of librarianship that brings Indigenous approaches to areas such as knowledge organization, collection development, library and information services, language and cultural practices, and education. [1] The Encyclopedia of Library and Information Sciences (3rd ed.) states that Indigenous librarianship emerged as a "distinct field of practice and an arena for international scholarship in the late twentieth century bolstered by a global recognition of the value and vulnerability of Indigenous knowledge systems, and of the right of Indigenous peoples to control them." [2]
Indigenous librarianship is supported by a number of professional associations, a growing body of research, and both professional and educational initiatives. Indigenous librarianship can be practised by both Indigenous and non-Indigenous librarians [3] and exists all over the world, including across Aotearoa (New Zealand), [4] Australia, [5] Hawai'i, [4] Sápmi (Northern Europe and Russia), [6] South America, [7] Sudan, [8] Turtle Island (North America), [2] and Udmurtia. [9] To date, the largest centres of activity for Indigenous librarianship are in Aotearoa and in what are now known as Australia, Canada, and the United States. [1]
Indigenous librarianship prioritizes the interests, practices, needs, and support of Indigenous peoples. Indigenous culture and concerns are therefore used to guide and implement library and information practices, as well as to ensure that the practices of Indigenous librarianship advance Indigenous interests, such as sovereignty and self-determination. [1] Frameworks such as the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) are other key mechanisms for ensuring that practice and research are ethical and for centring Indigenous rights. For example, using appropriate and respectful cultural protocols for the handling of Indigenous knowledge, including traditional knowledge, is one way Indigenous librarianship is practised.
Indigenous Librarianship can contrast with or be in conflict with non-Indigenous librarianship practices and research, which are often heavily influenced by colonialism. As Indigenous librarianship is connected to the advancement of Indigenous rights it has been deemed to be one of the more political forms of librarianship. [10]
In North America librarians are typically expected to have a master's degree from a program accredited by the ALA. Some universities offer specialized programs in Indigenous librarianship. The University of British Columbia offers a First Nation Curriculum Concentration for both their Master of Archival Studies and Master of Library and Information Studies. [11] At the University of Arizona School of Information, M.A. Library and Information Science students can apply to the Knowledge River Program, which focuses on the information needs of Latino, Native American and Black communities. [12] In 2021, the Bridging Knowledge program was announced, which will support 15 American Indian, Alaska Native, and Native Hawaiian students in earning their Masters of Library and Information Science through San José State University School of Information. [13]
Other educational bodies and programs related to Indigenous librarianship and Indigenous knowledge practices include:
Indigenous peoples hold unique languages and ways of knowing, often including their relationship to and stewardship of their lands. According to the United Nations (UN), there are "more than 476 million Indigenous peoples living in all regions of the world" and the UN emphasizes the importance of understanding the term Indigenous to be based on "self-identification as Indigenous peoples" at both individual and community levels. As such, no single official definition of the term Indigenous has been adopted by the UN. [24] Moreover, the term Indigenous is not acceptable to all peoples and there are many other terms that may be used instead of, or alongside, the term Indigenous by individuals, communities, or groups.
The International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA) reflects a similar approach to understanding the term Indigenous as that of the UN. IFLA chose to adopt Loriene Roy's stance that "Indigenous people know who they are" [25] rather than trying to define Indigenous peoples monolithically.
Indigenous librarianship recognizes the need to protect Indigenous ways of knowing. It resists colonizing and other oppressive practices that historically and currently exclude Indigenous knowledges or push them to the margins in institutions such as libraries. Moreover, due to these same forces of colonization and oppression, Indigenous individuals and their expertise are often drastically underrepresented in LIS professions. [26] [3]
Part of the work of Indigenous librarianship is to create more space and advocate for Indigenous peoples within Indigenous librarianship itself, and in the field of LIS more broadly. [26] [3] Indigenous librarianship also works to ensure that Indigenous peoples have access to information organizations that accurately and respectfully reflect their cultures, knowledges, and protocols.
There are several libraries throughout the world that focus on serving Indigenous communities and that centre Indigenous knowledge practices. These include:
A number of national and international professional associations, organizations, and committees exist that support and otherwise intersect with the work of Indigenous librarianship.
Compared with Knowledge Organization (KO), Indigenous Knowledge Organization (IKO) includes methodologies through which Indigenous peoples create protocols to help name, articulate, collate, and make accessible objects that indicate Indigenous knowledge. [68]
One of the main criticisms that IKO scholars offer of existing KO practices is that traditional means of cataloguing and classifying knowledge result in the marginalization, omission, or misrepresentation of Indigenous topics. [69] IKO scholars argue for the limitations of traditional classification systems used in the library workplace. In particular, the widely used Library of Congress Classification (LCC), Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH), and the Dewey Decimal System (DDC) schemes have been criticized for lacking terminology and categories specific to Indigenous Peoples and for ignoring the presence of localized epistemological schemes. For example, LCC has been criticized for using insensitive, outdated terms, such as its subject heading of "Indians of North America", and for failing to offer nuance for referring to varied Indigenous groups, such as First Nations, Inuit and Metis peoples. [70]
Another key criticism made by IKO scholars is that, aside from erasure, current means of organizing materials of Indigenous peoples often reproduce Western disciplinary assumptions that risk ‘othering’ Indigenous communities in binary opposition to Western counterparts. [71] These systems can “silence” the heterogeneity of Indigenous peoples and push aside practices that test for cultural appropriateness of classification, curriculum, and pedagogy. [72] For example, under many Western schemes, Native Knowledge is frequently and incorrectly classified under ‘American History’, thus erasing the visibility of Indigenous history and making it seem as if Indigenous peoples are historical groups subsumed by Western history, rather than presenting them as the actively living, autonomous, modern cultures that they are. [73]
There are a variety of alternative KO systems developed in response to the critiques offered by IKO scholars. For example, the University of Hawaii spearheaded the KVJ Law Classification Project in order to provide Indigenous legal expertise in re-classifying law materials. [74] The Brian Deer Classification System is a specialized classification system for Indigenous materials. A modified version of the Brian Deer Classification System serves as the X̱wi7x̱wa Classification Scheme at the University of British Columbia's X̱wi7x̱wa Library. The National Library of New Zealand uses the Ngā Upoko Tukutuku (subject headings in te reo Māori) to better reflect Māori terminology and concepts relevant to the Māori community. [75]
Other examples of IKO systems include:
Given the wide geographic reach of Indigenous librarianship, and the diversity of Indigenous peoples who either are undertaking or are impacted by this work, there can be no universal protocols for Indigenous librarianship. [85] Instead, these protocols must be established locally. However, Indigenous scholars Sandra Littletree, Miranda Belarde-Lewis, and Marisa Duarte point to the prominent role of relationality between living people, lands, objects, ancestors, and future generations across many iterations of Indigenous librarianship and frame this as a crucial feature of Indigenous librarianship praxis. [86]
As a praxis, Indigenous librarianship is attuned to the ways in which knowledge cannot be separated from its relationships with people, places, objects, and the rest of its ecology. As described by Alissa Cherry and Keshav Mukunda, "Indigenous knowledge systems are characterized by their holistic view of the world, in particular this means that knowledge cannot be separated from the individual or group holding it." [87] The role of relationality is also evident, for example, in Deborah Lee's articulation of the three Rs of doing Indigenous research in LIS, namely, respect, reciprocity, and relationality. [88] Other expressions of this relationality can be traced through Loriene Roy's assertion that Indigenous librarianship places "less emphasis on tools than on the relationships between people and their connections to traditional knowledge", [89] in Jessie Loyer's explication of practices of kinship within Indigenous information literacy practices, [90] and Alison Krebs' statement that "as Indigenous peoples we exist within dynamic and interactive webs of relationship governed by mutual respect, reciprocity, and relational accountability”. [91]
This relationality means that "Indigenous peoples often remark that you cannot separate the part from the whole". [92] Conversely, such a separation is often a characteristic of non-Indigenous LIS practices, including cataloguing and the conceptual and physical separation of libraries, archives, museums, and other places of cultural memory and heritage from each other. [92] Furthermore, the praxis of Indigenous librarianship differs from "the broader field of library and information science" in that it shifts focus from "principles of controlled vocabulary, specificity, literary warrant, coherence and standardization, and moving from the general to the specific in subject categorization" in favour of a "more community-based approach, namely, a relational approach," which, in turn, gives rise more holistically to protocols and modes of knowledge exchange. [93]
Numerous protocols and standards exist for Indigenous communities throughout the world. These protocols act as best practices for an organization when dealing with Indigenous Peoples and materials and include the following:
Indigenous intellectual and cultural property rights approach the concepts of intellectual and cultural property from a non-Western view point. The intent is to protect Indigenous knowledge and works from being exploited or appropriated within other media or by cultural institutions. The proclivity to share knowledge is not equivalent to allowing this knowledge to be appropriated. For example, open-access information, including the automatic legal transference of intellectual property into the public domain, are highly valued in many fields of LIS, but it is important to recognize the role of European intellectual property laws and practices in such ideas of openness and publicity. As articulated by Indigenous scholars, including Greg Younging, these intellectual laws and their resulting concepts are often at odds with Indigenous knowledges, which can include specific protocols guiding how, when, and to whom certain knowledge should be passed. [105] These laws also overlook the ways in which Indigenous knowledges have historically been violently extracted, appropriated, and used for profit or other gain by non-Indigenous individuals and groups before being made 'open' knowledge. Examples of works that have appropriated Indigenous works include Deep Forest. [106]
A major effort in protecting Indigenous Intellectual and Cultural Property has been the development of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Protocols for Libraries, Archives and Information Services. These Protocols are intended to help Indigenous works be managed in a way that is culturally appropriate. The Protocols were published in 1995 by the Australian Library and Information Association (ALIA).The Protocols provide guides to libraries on ways to manage Indigenous works in their collections. [107] These protocols also focus on providing Indigenous communities with more pathways to employment in information fields in an attempt to help reclaim sovereignty over Intellectual and Cultural Property dispersion. [108]
The United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) was a further step in providing coverage and protections for Indigenous Intellectual and Cultural Property. UNDRIP isn't a legally binding ratification, but instead a framework that can be used to guide institutions toward giving more control to Indigenous people over their works. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada directly referenced the UNDRIP in its Calls to Action in an attempt to allow Indigenous works in archives to be more accessible to the communities in which they originated. [106]
The rights of Indigenous peoples to hold autonomy over their knowledges are articulated within UNDRIP through the following Articles:
Digital repatriation (or virtual repatriation) is the returning of digital copies of cultural heritage items, such as recordings, documents, and images, to the originating community. [110] In an Indigenous context, this involves returning Indigenous cultural expressions to the relevant Indigenous community. [111] As cultural memory institutions increasingly digitize their collections, [112] Indigenous communities may be involved with determining descriptions for, and controlling access to, digital objects. [113] Institutions may also repatriate collection and object rights to Indigenous communities. These materials may form a local knowledge base, requiring digital knowledge organization systems that can accommodate Indigenous cultural protocols. [111] Such efforts at repatriation have prompted software development specifically for this purpose. [114]
Library and Archives Canada (LAC) created the Indigenous Heritage Action Plan in 2019 in response to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. [115] The action plan affirms the rights of Indigenous peoples as laid out in UNDRIP and contains 28 concrete actions that will be undertaken by LAC. [115] These actions include: increasing Indigenous community engagement with LAC, seeking the council of an Elder-In-Residence, following Indigenous cultural protocols, increased partnerships with Indigenous communities regarding the loaning of documents, utilizing crowdsourcing software to allow for Indigenous people to contribute knowledge to digital collections, examining Indigenous-led access management of some LAC collections, such as those created from Indigenous knowledge, and collaborating with Indigenous communities to preserve non-governmental archival records according to the preferences of the community, whether at LAC or locally. [115]
In 2010, the Reciprocal Research Network (RRN) was launched as a partnership between the Museum of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia, the Musqueam Indian Band, the Stó:lō Nation/Tribal Council, and the U’mista Cultural Society. [116] The RRN is an online tool that contains digital copies of Indigenous objects from the Northwest coast of British Columbia held at 29 institutions. [117] The RRN allows for collaborative research between members and allows members to create their own projects using objects from many different holding institutions. [118] Each co-developer has a member in the steering group, allowing them to contribute to decisions regarding the platform's scope, schedule, and budget. [116]
Indigenous collection development focuses on providing culturally relevant library resources by, for, and with Indigenous people. [119] Generally, the criteria for planning and building library collections are guided by collection development policies aimed at addressing the needs of a library's users. [120] In Indigenous contexts collection development practices and policies aim to provide barrier free access to culturally relevant materials for the communities they serve, [121] which can range from Indigenous community libraries to Indigenous collections within public libraries. To give some examples, the First Nations University of Canada library collection policy focuses primarily on the materials written by, for, and about the First Nations, Inuit, and Métis peoples of Canada; [122] the Blackfoot Digital Library is dedicated to creating a Blackfoot-centric collection; [123] the New South Wales (NSW) State Library Indigenous Collecting Strategy broadly serves to focus on "developing its collections of material created by Indigenous people, who have contributed, and continue to contribute, to the life of NSW and its communities." [124] Additionally, Indigenous collection development may be guided by Indigenous protocols that address the specific, local needs of Indigenous communities. For example, the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies ( AIATSIS) collection is guided by the AIATSIS Collection Development Policy [125] as well as Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Library Information and Resource Network (ATSILIRN) Protocols for Libraries, Archives and Information Services. [126] Though Indigenous collection development strategies are defined by the specific library contexts and communities they serve, some shared considerations emerge across diverse Indigenous collection development processes:
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: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (
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