Indigenous Knowledge (IK) is recognised as a valuable, often untapped resource. It is increasingly important to record un-captured IK for the purposes of protection, preservation and promotion. The potential of IK for the use of scientific research and development is known and can be financially beneficial to the holders of IK in communities when managed properly. The need to be able to effectively explore recorded IK for the purposes of scientific investigation and to prove prior knowledge is increasing. The exploration of IK recorded as free-form stories is found to be less effective for these purposes. In order to increase the effectiveness of exploration of recorded IK, an approach was defined to enrich the processes of IK collection by defining structured metadata to be collected in addition to the IK story itself. The National Recordal System (NRS) initiative in South Africa has been used as a case study for this approach. The approach, implementation, evaluation and results in terms of the effectiveness of the process, the effect of the introduction of structured metadata in the process and the resulting effectiveness of exploration are described in this paper.

For centuries, rural communities have relied on their indigenous knowledge for survival and sustenance. Indigenous Knowledge (IK) is understood as local knowledge, which is unique and traditional to a specific community. Due to the fact that IK plays an important role in the general well-being of a community, IK needs to be properly collected and protected. In view of this, the South African government undertook the development of a National Recordal System (NRS). However, User Experience (UX) in IKS has been largely ignored and as a result very little is understood of UX related challenges within the IKS field. This paper makes a case for the understanding of UX challenges confronting IK Recorders in rural communities in South Africa. Understanding UX challenges will improve on the overall quality of the captured IK and is important for the enhancement of the NRS processes, tools and the system that has been deployed.

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User Experience (UX) is understood as the experience that a person gains when interacting with a product in terms of how easy or pleasing it is to use such a product. Computer applications are the most common products evaluated for user experience. Based on primary data collected through a case study research strategy, this paper argues that a process is an important element of user experience that needs to be considered when collecting Indigenous Knowledge (IK) in rural communities in South Africa. Our research findings show that the defined IK recording process may be understood as having impact on usability if IK recorders have problems completing their tasks when following this process. The implications here are that the scope of applying UX evaluation should now be expanded to include processes; because processes describe how a task is to be accomplished; this is very similar to what the user interface of a computer application is meant to achieve. This is the key contribution of this paper to the user experience body of knowledge.