The Ancient Kemetic Roots of Library and Information Science

Abstract

Contrary to traditional library history taught in American schools of library and information science, the library, as an institution, and librarianship, as a profession, have their roots in ancient African society. Thus Africa, in addition to being the birthplace of the modern human species, is also the birthplace of librarianship. Thousands of years before the emergence of Greece as the fountainhead of Western civilization, Africans in ancient Kemet (Egypt) had developed an advanced system for collecting, organizing, describing, preserving, and providing access to information, and had developed a class of professionals to operate the system. Until this truth is known, and incorporated into our social consciousness and the library school curriculum, we will continue to masquerade as the informed, when, in reality; we are the misinformed and miseducated educated. An African centered corrective paradigm juxtaposes and probes the above phenomena (note: the author used photographs and illustrations to further support his arguments. 1 The Journal of Pan African Studies, vol.5, no.1, e-Document, March 2012