Friday, October 26, 2007

actkm (3)

After some very interesting papers from Luke Naismith, Richard Vines & Laurie Lock Lee, Tory Maile talked about Cultural Heritage Information Management Systems (CHIMS). These systems allow indigenous communities to preserve stories, images & recordings - mapped to representations of their environment. The first example he talked about was a system at Uluru. Cultural protocols restrict certain knowledge to men & to women so certain parts of the site are only accessible to those groups. Troy worked on another system in Vanuatu and is now in the wet tropics of Queensland working on a cultural heritage project with the Aboriginal Rainforest Council. As this involves 18 tribal groups (made up of 50+ clans), the protocols will be a bit more complicated.

Troy made the following priceless observation: Indigenous people in Australia had 60,000 years to work out their protocols - most organisations have not been around that long.

No comments: