Involving source communities in the digitization and preservation of indigenous knowledge

Abstract

The digital era has transformed the ways people share information and preserve knowledge for the future. Increasingly, Web 2.0 technologies have been used for participatory practices aimed at constructing cultural heritage knowledge. Memory institutions, including libraries and museums have become keen on opportunities to engage with potential partners and collaborators. For such participatory construction of cultural knowledge to be successful however, some underlying contradictions between traditional documentary practices that privilege ‘expert knowledge’ and the distributed social Web practices that emphasize the allowance for multiple (at times contradictory) perspectives need to be resolved. This interpretive qualitative study examines the values and challenges of collaborating with communities who are the originators, owners and/or guardians of the traditional beliefs, expressions and other cultural artifacts that bear the indigenous knowledge of a cultural group, as well as people who are recognized by indigenous communities to hold the knowledge. Data was collected through 27 semi-structured interviews in Ghana.