Indigenous voices in the land of the head-hunters: local content development of Sarawak’s Northern Region

Abstract

Sarawak State Library (Pustaka) aims to become a center of excellent in Sarawak collection. This paper shares Pustaka’s role in collecting, organizing, preserving local culture and heritage of the people in Sarawak’s northern region. Local Content means Sarawak’s heritage and cultures that show the identity of multi-ethnicity in Sarawak. They are the legacy practiced, inherited and passed down from one generation to the next. Pustaka took the initiative to organise annual competition to crowd source local content development need. More than 40 topics have been done and these contributed to knowledge creation for young generation. As part of this program, Pustaka’s train participants through Information Literacy Skills Program to produce students who are aware of the importance of information, understand the information requirement needed for learning progress and self-development. This initiative is hoped to be able to boost the power of creativity and innovation in young researchers when generating research work that is comprehensive, original and attractive. The collaborative efforts with the State education department, institutes of higher learning and teachers’ training centre ensured that the competition has the transparency and adjudged fairly. Participants, who are secondary students aged between 14 to 18 year old, undergo workshops organized by the library, particularly on how to write research, referencing and avoid plagiarism as well as how to make visual presentations. Pustaka...