This presentation discusses the development of digital curatorial workflows for managing, vetting and sharing indigenous community cultural heritage and intellectual property by the open source platforms Local Contexts (www.localcontexts.org) and Mukurtu CMS (www.mukurtu.org), working in collaboration with the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress (www.loc.gov/folklife) and the Passamaquoddy Nation of Maine. Local Contexts (www.localcontexts.org) is a new initiative to support Native, First Nations, Aboriginal, and Indigenous communities in the management of their intellectual property (IP) and cultural heritage specifically within the digital environment. Combining both legal and educational components including the development of the Traditional Knowledge (TK) Labels, Local Contexts has two objectives: One is to promote a new classificatory, curatorial and display paradigm for museums, libraries and archives that hold extensive collections of indigenous people’s cultural heritage by allowing information from and by the community of origin to be expressed in catalog records. The other objective is to enhance and legitimize indigenous decision-making and control over IP, especially in determining and culturally appropriate conditions for sharing historical and contemporary collections of material and digital culture.
In this project, the Passamaquoddy Nation is developing its own unique set of Local Contexts’ TK Labels within the innovative, open-source Mukurtu CMS platform (www.mukurtu.org) so that community members can annotate, narrate and share their content across platforms and institutions. The TK Labels will become part of the metadata for the Library of Congress’s recent preservation digitization recordings of the original wax cylinders of Passamaquoddy people documented by anthropologist Jesse Walter Fewkes in 1890; these are among the earliest known ethnographic field recordings in the world. Audience members are encouraged to participate in a discussion of various components of this initiative to develop new digital tools and methods for managing cultural heritage and intellectual property rights that center and prioritize Native communities cultural protocols for access and circulation.
