Web Archiving of Indigenous Knowledge Systems in Asia and Africa: A Comparative Study
Ranjan Samanta, Dipanjali Chakraborty · Journal of advanced scientific education and research · 2023
Introduction: Indigenous Knowledge (IK) is considered the fundamental element of a country's knowledge.This paper presents a general outlook by defining the indigenous knowledge as well as its characteristic features and various types.Purpose: Aim of this study is to survey the selected indigenous knowledge systems (IKS) repositories of two continents: Asia & Africa, by evaluating their collection, notable features, different policies, dealing subjects etc.Design: Eight major libraries and repositories, four from each Asia and Africa were chosen who are completely and partially devoted to maintain an indigenous knowledge collection, across the continent of Africa and Asia.This study aims to perform a comparative analysis among the repositories of Asia and Africa based on thirteen (13) criteria like dealing subjects, document types, file format, search option, access policy, copyright policy, classification, cataloguing, indexing technique, Archival technique etc.Findings: In Asian and African (except African Online Digital Library) context, most importance has been given to preserve the traditional medicine.Same importance needs to be given to preserve the traditional food and the communities.Most of the databases were developed while keeping in mind of a particular geographic area (e.g., India, Ghana).Since, maintaining a database that covers the entire continent might be impossible and far-fetched, measures should be taken to create databases that focus into a specific region (e.g.North, South).Originality: All the previous researches undertaken in this field have dealt with repositories located in a specific geographical area (e.g.Africa).This is, by far, the first research that has not only dealt with repositories from two continents at the same time, but also performed a comparative analysis between them.