Digitizing Traditional Culture

• Author: Wend Wendland/Jessyca Van Weelde
• Position: Traditional Creativity, Cultural Expressions and Cultural Heritage Section, WIPO

This was the situation of the Maasai community of Laikipia, Kenya, when they first requested assistance from WIPO in 2006. As a result of an exploratory visit to the community, WIPO will launch in September a pilot training program designed to assist indigenous communities to document their own cultural traditions, archive this heritage for future generations and manage their IP interests when doing so.

Using technology to preserve tradition

New digital technologies offer a practical means to document, record and digitize expressions of traditional cultures. Such means respond to the strong desire in indigenous communities to preserve, revitalize and promote their cultural heritage, and to pass it on to succeeding generations. However, the documentation and digitization of living traditions, which embody both communal creativity and individual artistic expression, is highly complex. Further, without careful IP management, digitized intangible cultural heritage is vulnerable to unwanted exploitation.

WIPO's pilot training program will respond to both the utility of technology for indigenous communities and the paramount need to empower communities to make informed decisions about how to manage IP issues in a way that corresponds with community values and development goals. The primary goal of the program is to provide community members with the practical skills and technical knowledge needed in the fields of cultural documentation, archiving and IP management, which would enable them to record, archive and manage access to their own cultural heritage. The program will assist communities to develop their own IP policies, protocols and technology-based tools to manage access to their recordings and other forms of cultural documentation (see text box).

The pilot program in September will be run in collaboration with the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress in Washington D.C. and the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina.

Maasai community first to benefit

In September two members of the Maasai community and an expert from the National Museums of Kenya will travel to the American Folklife Center and then to the Center for Documentary Studies for the training. The intensive, hands-on curriculum will include such topics as...