Digital Library to Protect Indigenous Knowledge

According to a January 10, 2005 article from SciDev.net, the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) will create a composite digital library including individual Traditional Knowledge Digital Libraries (TKDL) from each country in South Asia. The planned initiative follows the success of India's own TKDL which contains information on 36,000 formulations used in Ayurveda -- India's 5,000-year-old system of traditional medicine -- presented in English, French, German, Spanish and Japanese. The meeting's delegates hope that the Internet library will be used to "fight contentious patent claims by proving the prior existence of knowledge, as well as promoting research on novel drugs, enhancing the region's share of the global herbal medicine market, and helping set the international agenda on intellectual property rights."