Understanding the Role of Community Collaboration Within Indigenous Cultural Heritage Data Migrations

Abstract

Many museums and archives globally hold heritage items belonging to Indigenous peoples of North America. There are current efforts to begin decolonizing the practices and legacies of these collections, and one way this is done is through digital access to Indigenous cultural heritage. This poster examines The Great Lakes Research Alliance for the Study of Aboriginal Arts and Cultures (GRASAC) Knowledge Sharing System, a digital platform that aggregates museum and archival records into a centralized database at a point of data migration. Data migrations are not only necessary as a point for technical updates, but also for theoretical changes in the system itself as the needs of its users change. This is the case for the knowledge sharing system as it moves from a password protected system to one that is open to the public. Rooted in qualitative research from semi-structured interviews with the creators, maintainers, and users of the database, this poster illustrates how GRASAC is working to meet the needs of their user community, and what unique challenges are faced when prioritizing Indigenous knowledge within a database created for western information organization.

FemiLISm now!: Identifying and exploring feminist theories and methods in CAIS/ACSI and ASIS&T conference proceedings, 1993-2021

“…All four of the conference proceedings that were categorized in the subdomain of knowledge organization took a critical stance toward neutrality and persuasively demonstrated the harms invoked when knowledge and knowers are marginalized (Olson and Ward 1997;Olson and Schlegl 1999;Rayburn 2021;Allard et al 2018). These researchers contest concepts of universalism and neutrality and suggest that feminist, anti-colonialist, Indigenous, and other critical frameworks make power visible in LIS systems and contexts.…”

On our own terms

“…In our findings, feminist theories were also often used in conjunction with other critical theories, such as decolonization, critical race, and queer theory, to apply an intersectional lens to research topics. For example, approaches included "black feminism" (Gray, 2020), "feminist and Indigenous data practices" (Rayburn, 2021), and "critiques from feminist, queer, critical race, and social theory" (Burns et al, 2018). More research is needed to understand the relationships between feminisms and critical theories, including how these frameworks are distinct from each other, related, overlapping, complimentary, and often intersectional.…”