Unexpected advice

During the NDF2011 today I was in "Digital initiatives in Māori communities" put on the the talented Honiana Love and Claire Hall from the Te Reo o Taranaki Charitable Trust about their work on He Kete Kōrero. At the end I asked a question "Most of us [the audience] are in institutions with te Reo Māori holdings or cultural objects of some description. What small thing can we do to help enable our collections for the iwi and hapū source communities? Use Māori Subject Headings? The Iwi / Hapū list? Geotagging? ..." Quick-as-a-blink the response was "Geotagging." If I understood the answer (given mainly by Honiana) correctly, the point was that geotagging is much more useful because it's much more likely to be done right in contexts like this. Presumably because geotagging lends itself to checking, validation and visualisations that make errors easy to spot in ways that these other metadata forms don't; it's better understood by those processing the documents and processing the data.

I think it's fabulous that we're getting feedback from indigenous groups using information systems in indigenous contexts, particularly feedback about previous attempts to cater to their needs. If this is the experience of other indigenous groups, it's really important.