Comments on: The Maori versus Dewey

By: maori_librarian

maori_librarian — Tue, 20 May 2008 23:51:29 +0000

Kia ora. Interesting viewpoints in your bloggs and there looks to be a certain amount of research, reflection and synthesis.

You may want to look at the situation wholistically though in terms of where information access/collection management is placed within the general context of Maori fears, values and aspirations in pre-european society and today?

I have a feeling that once you have an idea of the general contexts then you’ll be able to more or less see or even ‘predict’ the nature of past, exisiting or future information access and management solutions for Maori.

Hint: tino rangatiratanga!

By: Peter

Peter — Sun, 21 May 2006 15:40:32 +0000

Thanks Viki. You’re right, I’m pretty clueless here. I only based this on a paper I found, I didn’t have the chance to do actual more research into the topic.

Thanks for the critique!

By: Viki

Viki — Thu, 18 May 2006 03:15:09 +0000

Here is a critique of what you have to say:
It’s Maori, not ‘the’ Maori. Did you consult Maori on this topic? Do you realise that different Iwi across Aotearoa hold different values? And do you realise that although you are right, from my point of view as a Pakaha, culture is not static - and I felt offended reading this, as though Maori cannot handle a western system and are too ‘dumb’.
We cannot assume that it is up to us to ‘fix’ this - if Maori have a problem, then their right to Tino-rangatiritanga (article 2 in the Treaty of Waitangi) means that Maori have the resources and right to establish their own library and system.
Oh, and Whale Rider was ONE community, one whanau, not the whole bloody population.
Viki, New Zealand

By: Peter Van Dijck’s Guide to Ease » Blog Archive » The case against findability.

Wed, 19 Oct 2005 14:35:07 +0000

[...] I wrote about the Maori a while ago. A really important concept in Maori culture is “tapu�?. It means that certain knowledge shouldn’t be shown to just anyone. [...]

By: dgm

dgm — Mon, 18 Apr 2005 06:26:04 +0000

very interesting. I’m currently involved in building a digital asset system to manage a large collection of (digitised) Australian Indigenous music and songs, and tanentially involved in another project where local indigenous people will use digicams and so on to record their own information and culture.

Classification is interesting, as they have a knowledge structure that explains how their view of the world works and they can draw you a diagram. It’s all wonderfully consistent and not western.

The question for me (and my colleagues) is how do you map what makes sens to them into a database structure to allow us to manage and preserve the recording and its metadata for ever - or do we jsut store their metadata as ablob and write our own mets wrapper to cover their metadata and our dublin core preservation metadata?