Indigenous Knowledges: a Digital Residency Exchange and Best Practices Pilot
Lead Research Organisation:
University of York
Department Name: English and Related Literature
Abstract
The Indigenous Knowledges Digital Residency Exchange and Best Practice Pilot has significantly furthered conversation in the UK around the place of Indigenous Knowledge Protocols and Indigenous Research ethics in the digital cataloguing of archives and collections. It has also-inevitably-revealed some of the blocks to achieving best practice in ongoing attempts to address partial, missing, and incorrect representation of Indigenous objects, stories, and knowledges, in digital spaces attached to British institutions. Given the long and still under-addressed legacy of British impacts on Indigenous communities it is essential that this work continues in holistic and ethical ways. Among those blocks, the three that we seek to overcome all relate to the dissemination of our core findings, which include:
1. British institutions are severely constrained by material and intellectual factors, whether that be an insufficiency of curatorial time or limited knowledge about the cultural and historical contexts of Indigenous holdings or their relationships to present-day communities.
2. Addressing the representation of Indigenous belongings in British catalogues is further hindered by the complexity (in the larger institutions) or absence (in regional sites) of digital cataloguing. In some cases, multiple CMSs govern single collections; in others, digitization remains a distant objective. In both, the implementation of "quick fixes" that allow for Indigenous engagement through digital tools is complex.
3. Finally, British institutions largely lack the necessary knowledge as to how to build meaningful relationships with communities-absolutely essential work for the ethical treatment of Indigenous knowledges in digital spaces-such that even where institutional will and/or knowledge is present, progress stalls.
Our proposed activities will directly address all three of these. The formation of a working group is intended to bring British curators and archivists into sustained conversation with their Indigenous counterparts and other experts. It will be a horizontal exchange of practice and understanding in order to build comprehension of the protocols and their application; to explore gaps in personal and institutional knowledge; and to explore collective solutions to the problems curators face in this area. While there will be some very direct educational benefit to British curators in this, it will also be of immense value to Indigenous curators and archivists-especially those at tribal colleges-in terms of building an international network and developing best practice. Working together in this way will address the challenges faced by institutions where curatorial teams have been significantly reduced, while also keeping material commitment low. This will also address that third problem, by both generating connections between Indigenous and non-Indigenous members of the working group and ensuring GLAM professionals in Britain understand the routes to connection with communities. This latter will be further developed through the establishing of a cross-institutional Mukurtu portal. Following the Plateau Peoples' Web Portal model, this site will bring items connected to source communities from a range of British holdings into a single space, allowing those communities to engage with the digital curation of their ancestral belongings without the need to implement technological fixes on their own CMSs. This process will bring curators into contact with community representatives and will help to initiate the work of building reciprocal relationships. Participants in the working group will be selected by two means: self-selection via the evaluation survey for our IK webinars; and direct reach-out to ensure adequate Indigenous representation and the inclusion of academic GLAM programmes to include the next generation of curators and archivists. We will particularly encourage participation from smaller, regional collections.
1. British institutions are severely constrained by material and intellectual factors, whether that be an insufficiency of curatorial time or limited knowledge about the cultural and historical contexts of Indigenous holdings or their relationships to present-day communities.
2. Addressing the representation of Indigenous belongings in British catalogues is further hindered by the complexity (in the larger institutions) or absence (in regional sites) of digital cataloguing. In some cases, multiple CMSs govern single collections; in others, digitization remains a distant objective. In both, the implementation of "quick fixes" that allow for Indigenous engagement through digital tools is complex.
3. Finally, British institutions largely lack the necessary knowledge as to how to build meaningful relationships with communities-absolutely essential work for the ethical treatment of Indigenous knowledges in digital spaces-such that even where institutional will and/or knowledge is present, progress stalls.
Our proposed activities will directly address all three of these. The formation of a working group is intended to bring British curators and archivists into sustained conversation with their Indigenous counterparts and other experts. It will be a horizontal exchange of practice and understanding in order to build comprehension of the protocols and their application; to explore gaps in personal and institutional knowledge; and to explore collective solutions to the problems curators face in this area. While there will be some very direct educational benefit to British curators in this, it will also be of immense value to Indigenous curators and archivists-especially those at tribal colleges-in terms of building an international network and developing best practice. Working together in this way will address the challenges faced by institutions where curatorial teams have been significantly reduced, while also keeping material commitment low. This will also address that third problem, by both generating connections between Indigenous and non-Indigenous members of the working group and ensuring GLAM professionals in Britain understand the routes to connection with communities. This latter will be further developed through the establishing of a cross-institutional Mukurtu portal. Following the Plateau Peoples' Web Portal model, this site will bring items connected to source communities from a range of British holdings into a single space, allowing those communities to engage with the digital curation of their ancestral belongings without the need to implement technological fixes on their own CMSs. This process will bring curators into contact with community representatives and will help to initiate the work of building reciprocal relationships. Participants in the working group will be selected by two means: self-selection via the evaluation survey for our IK webinars; and direct reach-out to ensure adequate Indigenous representation and the inclusion of academic GLAM programmes to include the next generation of curators and archivists. We will particularly encourage participation from smaller, regional collections.
