Indigenous Knowledge and Culturally Responsive Methods in Information Research

Research and professional practice in librarianship has increasingly turned to community‐focused information services (CIS), which allow people to participate in creating and sharing information about themselves and their communities. These information services have a great potential to empower and engage marginalized communities; however, in this article we argue that current methods used in libraries for creating CIS resources face a significant omission—they fail to account for cultural differences in how information circulates within communities, which is particularly relevant for many indigenous communities that maintain established hierarchies that dictate appropriate ways for cultural information to be shared. Often these culturally based hierarchies of access are directly in tension with some of the underlying principles of librarianship that place high value on free and equitable access to information. Given this tension, we extend existing research on CIS to propose a model for developing CIS that has collaborative and culturally sensitive research methods at its center.