Organization and Representation of Indigenous Scientific Production: A Case Study on the Institutional Repository in Brazil

Abstract

The 2019 United Nations General Assembly declared that the years of 2022 to 2032 will encompass the International Decade of Indigenous Languages. Within this context, information Science (IC) and knowledge organization (OC) play a central role in the construction of policies and actions aimed at preserving indigenous languages. As such, our research aimed to diagnose, make propositions, and run preliminary tests in an Institutional Repository (IR) of a Brazilian Federal University. More specifically, this work regards the inclusion of metadata to represent indigenous scientific production. The main operations in this study included the creation and adaptation of metadata fields in the Dublin Core scheme. These were to specifically indicate indigenous collective authorship, indigenous names in an authorship, summaries in indigenous language, keywords in indigenous language, and title in indigenous language. The methods were literature review, applied research, and an experimental research. The implementations made in RI enabled, even if on a preliminary basis, the institution's repository as a robust instrument for archiving and accessing scientific information. It is also a means for preservation, visibility, appreciation, and respect for indigenous languages and knowledge, which are currently threatened.