Identifying the Role of Libraries in Indigenous Knowledge Management: A Meta-Synthesize Study

Indigenous knowledge management refers to identifying, organizing, and disseminating indigenous knowledge. Indigenous knowledge management can play an important and effective role in the economic, social, and cultural development and progress of any region. Libraries are arteries of expertise, and librarians are mediators of knowledge. According to their activity, professional mission, and assigned duties, they can play an important role in indigenous knowledge management. Therefore, the current research was conducted to identify the role of libraries in indigenous knowledge management. The current research was applied in terms of purpose and qualitative using the meta-synthesis method with the seven-step method of Sandelowski and Barroso. In this way, the role of libraries in indigenous knowledge management was extracted and counted from related articles with a meta-synthesis of central concepts and categories. Nineteen years (from 2004 to 2023) were considered for the search. The thematic focus of the research was articles on libraries' role in indigenous knowledge management. After determining the research question, a comprehensive search was conducted based on the meta-combination method through systematic review. For this purpose, an attempt was made to search the resources published in English, including articles in Scopus, Emerald, Science Direct, Web of Science, and Taylor and Francis databases. A critical evaluation tool was used to determine the validity of the composite method and to determine the reliability, the agreement method between two coders was used. The coding process was conducted in three open, central, and selective stages. In this order, the number of codes after refining reached 290, 36 concepts, and five categories. Based on the results, the central role of libraries in managing indigenous knowledge with the concepts of professional mission, program development, human resources, target community, and facilities among 32 studies was extracted and counted. In general, the research results showed that libraries can play an essential and influential role in local knowledge management regarding their professional mission and assigned tasks if they benefit from the cooperation of people, officials, and related organizations. Proper local knowledge management by various libraries can provide economic and cultural development for local areas in society. The present research has extracted and calculated the role of libraries in local knowledge management in an integrated and profound way using the meta-combination method. This is even though previous research could not identify and present these roles in an integrated and coherent manner. The findings of this research have various potential applications: 1. Strengthening and preserving indigenous knowledge through the identified roles of libraries. 2. Providing useful insights for policymakers and decision-makers in the library sector. 3. Laying the foundation for developing a tool to measure the role of libraries in indigenous knowledge management. 4. Serving as the basis for designing an educational protocol for librarians.