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Background
Multiple countries have created working groups and commissioned studies to address and improve upon existing institutional inequities between Indigenous Peoples and national libraries.

In Australia, the Bringing Them Home report (1997) documented the loss of language, culture and community as a result of 150 years of colonial policies. This report helped informed future studies that identified lack of funding as an issue for exacerbating accessibility to equitable library services.

In Canada, the Canadian Federation of Library Associations (CFLA) is the main representative body of Canada’s library community and has worked to create the CFLA’s own publication in 2015: the Truth and Reconciliation Report and Recommendations. The Indigenous Matters Committee was subsequently created in response to implement the report’s recommendations.

In New Zealand, the Library and Information Association of New Zealand Aotearoa (LIANZA) launched the Te Ara Tika Guiding Voices report (1997) highlighting multiple library-centered issues such as continued inequalities in intellectual access and information literacy between the Māori community and the rest of the population. In response, the National Library Act (2003) was passed – emphasizing the promotion of Maori Knowledge and the appointing of the Library and Information Advisory Commission (LIAC) as an advisory body.

In the United States, the National Commission on Libraries and Information Science (NCLIS) – now consolidated to be part of the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) – launched studies into the deficit in accessible library services to on-reserve American Indians. This later informed the comprehensive report Pathways to Excellence: A Report on Improving Library and Information Services to Native American Peoples (1992) – which subsequently impacted state policies on library development.

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Indigenous Knowledge Organization (IKO)
Compared with Knowledge Organization (KO), Indigenous Knowledge Organization (IKO) are the methodologies that Native and Indigenous peoples create protocols to help name, articulate, collate, and make accessible objects that indicate Indigenous knowledge. The main criticism of existing KO practices by IKO scholars is that traditional means of cataloguing and classifying literature results in the marginalization, omission, or misrepresentation of Indigenous topics. In particular, IKO scholars argue for the limitations of traditional classification systems used in the library workplace, in particular: the Library of Congress (LCDS) or (LC) and the Dewey Decimal System (DDCS) schemes have been criticized for lacking terminology and categories specific to Indigenous Peoples and ignores using localized epistemological schemes. For example, LC has been criticized for failing to distinguish between First Nations, Inuit and Metis – instead categorizing them homogenously as ‘Aboriginal Peoples’. In the US, libraries have also classified Native Knowledge collectively under ‘American History’ due to the lack of diverse categories available in the existing system. Another key criticism by IKO is that asides from erasure, current ways that materials of Indigenous Peoples are organized often reproduce Western disciplinary assumptions that risk ‘othering’ Indigenous Communities in binary opposition to Western counterparts. These systems therefore risk “silencing” the heterogeneity of Indigenous Peoples, and risks producing theories about the most appropriate ways to educate the group, or practices that test for cultural appropriateness of curriculum and pedagogy for the group.

Different countries have promoted various alternative KO systems in response to these critiques offered by IKO scholarship. For example, the University of Hawaii spearheaded the KVJ Law Classification Project as one way to provide Indigenous Legal expertise in re-classifying law materials. The Brian Deer Classification System is also another alternative used at the University of British Columbia’s X̱wi7x̱wa Library. The National Library of New Zealand uses the Maori Subject Headings system to better reflect Maori terminology and concepts relevant to the Maori community.