Jakarta- The government is trying to preserve local wisdoms across Indonesia through the Local Knowledge Acquisition (APL) program, head of the National Research and Innovation Agency (BRIN) Laksana Tri Handoko has said.
“We want to make the local knowledge and wisdoms, which have been passed from generation to generation orally, into written knowledge,” he informed at the launch of “Webinar Series: APL Program in Book and Audiovisuals” on Wednesday.
APL is a program to record and disseminate various types of local knowledge as public literature sources for research and innovation projects.
The BRIN head said that the APL program also aims to explore Indonesia’s great potentials in cultural, culinary, racial, and linguistic diversity, which can inspire researchers.
The community can also contribute to the program by documenting their own local wisdoms, he added.
For instance, a community can document the traditional medicines used by them for generations and send the documentation to BRIN.
Later, the distribution rights of the results of the documentation, both in the form of books and audiovisuals, will be bought by BRIN, thus, the community’s works will be published and become an open source of information for the community.
These local wisdoms do not need to be scientifically proven since they will serve as inspirations for the researchers to carry out more detailed studies regarding the wisdoms, Handoko said.
If the implementation of local knowledge is scientifically proven through research, it may become Indonesia’s superior cultural product in the future, he added.
“We will become an open domain, which can be accessed by everyone. Thus, it is not only the BRIN researchers (who will be able to access the documentation), but also the teachers, college students, school students, and so on,” he added.
The public can submit their original works on local knowledge and wisdoms through the link https://linktr.ee/akuisisiBRIN. The works can be written or audiovisual and made individually or in a team.
BRIN will accept works in the form of monographs, anthologies, popular scientific books, textbooks, manuals, pictured story books, documentary films, animation films, fiction films, and innovative creative documentation.
The agency will give incentives to authors whose works are selected to be included in the APL program. The incentives will range from Rp6 million to Rp20 million for written works and from Rp5 million to Rp20 million for audiovisuals.
Source: Antara News