The Challenges Faced by African Libraries & Information Centres in Documenting & Preserving IK

African libraries and Information centres are faced with a plethora of challenges in the documentation of indigenous knowledge. Among the challenges is the lack of legal frameworks at national and international level to support the library efforts. Financial, human capacity and technology shortages pose a challenge to the documentation of indigenous knowledge in many African countries. The fast developing Information Communication Technologies continues to create a deficiency on how best libraries can document and disseminate this widely oral and community based knowledge to a widely globally accepted knowledge base. The paper discusses these challenges looking at some of the lessons learnt and the best practices that have emerged in dealing with the challenges noted.