Week 4: Cultural Aspects of Digital Libraries
The lecture will be led by Elke Duncker. The seminar
will be led by Chris Huyck.
Digital libraries have become a widespread phenomenon of knowledge management. Being accessible through the Internet, quite a number of digital libraries serve a wide range of users with different cultural backgrounds. At the same time they are based on Western -European and North American values and ways of knowledge transfer. The study reported here sets out to examine the cultural context of use, the actual use of traditional and digital libraries in this context and related usability problems to extract some of the most prominent cultural differences in using digital libraries. The Maori of New Zealand were chosen as subjects of this study, because of their oral style of knowledge transfer as opposed to knowledge transfer based on written language and repositories of texts as we find it, for instance, in Western European countries. The results show that Maori have multiple problems in accessing and using traditional and digital libraries. These include the use of classification systems and publications formats of traditional and digital libraries, procedural knowledge about the use of library catalogues and privacy and sacredness of knowledge in the Maori culture.
