I’m happy to inform you of a new open access book entitled Libraries and Indigenous Knowledge: A National Forum for Libraries, Archives and Information Services:

This book is an outcome of the Libraries and Indigenous Knowledge Colloquium held at the State Library of New South Wales in December 2004. The editors have taken advantage of the opportunity provided by the substance and scope of the papers presented at the Colloquium, and the degree of professional interest in the issues associated with Indigenous Knowledge in libraries and archives, to put together an edited collection that is accessible to a wider audience. If it is possible to guide the way readers respond to this collection, then perhaps the first thing the authors would like readers to take away would be an appreciation and understanding of the complexities that professionals must engage with in meeting the needs of Indigenous people and the issues associated with managing Indigenous knowledge. From the Indigenous perspective, we can well understand the profession’s desire to have clear prescriptions for practice and practical assistance. However, the path to developing clear and high standards of practice in this area rests on building a strong foundation for understanding what informs the concerns of Indigenous people about the intersection of our knowledge and cultural materials with library and archival systems and practice. This requires a broad sweep across issues of knowledge, culture, history, heritage, law, and information technologies. It requires consideration of articulations between the local/global, the Indigenous/Western, and traditional/contemporary dualities. Most importantly, it requires professional understanding at a level deep enough to generate problem-solving and innovations to practice to overcome the manifold tensions that emerge across all these in a diverse range of situations.

(via Material World)

As anthropologists move towards more and more open models of sharing knowledge it will be important to be aware of the potential conflicts this might cause for indigenous groups who wish to restrict access to that knowledge. We’ve all heard of individual words being trademarked, but what if indigenous people wish to restrict use of their entire language?

A great discussion is emerging over at the blog Transient Languages & Cultures, where Jane Simpson has summed up some of the central issues in an ongoing series of posts over at Language Log, together with significant additional commentary of her own:

Three differences are important here – a difference between rights held by an individual and rights held by a group, a difference over which rights can be traded and which are inalienable, and a difference as to whether a right-holder has the right to license other people to enjoy some part of that right.

The one case I’ve heard of before is that of the Hopi. The Hopi Cultural Preservation Office “sought to enact a Tribal ordinance that ‘the Hopi language shall be for the exclusive use of the Hopi people’” as discussed by Peter Whiteley. (I think there is another well known article on this, but I can’t recall where I read it.) Another related paper is “Protecting Traditional Knowledge and Expanding Access to Scientific Data” (PDF) by Eric Kansa (of the Digging Digitally blog), together with Jason Schultz (EFF) and Ahrash Bissell (Duke). Hopefully we will eventually create a page devoted to the topic over at the Open Access Anthropology Wiki.