Indigenous librarianship
The International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA) reflects a similar approach to understanding the term Indigenous as that of the UN.
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.
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.
[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.
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For example, LCC has been criticized for using insensitive, outdated terms, such as its subject heading of "Indians of North America", and for failing to offer nuance for referring to varied Indigenous groups, such as First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.
[71] These systems can "silence" the heterogeneity of Indigenous peoples and push aside practices that test for cultural appropriateness of classification, curriculum, and pedagogy.
[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.
[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.
[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.
[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.
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.
[114] Library and Archives Canada (LAC) created the Indigenous Heritage Action Plan in 2019 in response to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
[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.
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.
