osarome ogbebor

INTRODUCTION The literature on Indigenous Knowledge (IK) does not provide a single definition of the concept. Nevertheless, several traits distinguish IK broadly from other knowledge. IK is unique to a particular culture and society. It is the basis for local decision-making in agriculture, health, natural resource management and other activities. IK is embedded in community practices, institutions, relationships and rituals. It is essentially tacit knowledge that is not easily codifiable. Human beings gather knowledge basically for two purposes: survival and meaning. We try to understand and come to grips with the environment in order to survive. And we try to find reasons for our survival that go beyond the intuitive reaction to physical threats. This is in short the basis for all kind of activities which aim at building up knowledge systems. Long before the development of modern science, which is quite young, indigenous peoples have developed their ways of knowing how t...

INDEXING HISTORY Classifying, categorizing and organizing information seems to be a basic human activity. Flowing from this is the need to retrieve information using those skills. Indexing is the basic mode of doing this. The core of an index is using a known set of symbols, such as the alphabet.   Book index is indeed the oldest among the figurative or applied senses of the word, and that this specific usage (like the word itself) goes back to ancient Rome. There, when used in relation to literary works, the term index was used for the little slip attached to papyrus scrolls on which the title of the work (and sometimes also the name of the author) was written so that each scroll on the shelves could be easily identified without having to pull them out for inspection. So that the copyists may take some bits of parchment to make title slips from them. From this developed the usage of index for the title of books. Finding the actual first index seems to be a difficul...