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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, African people 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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Spirituality is defined in cultural terms. The African’s lifelong sojourn for balance and harmony within himself or herself and within society is the essence of the spiritual being. Therefore, spirituality is defined as the African’s search for personal balance and harmony as well as that of society. The concept of Nommo, the power generated from the Spoken Word, is crucial in articulating the spiritual and philosophical nature of language for African people. The fulfillment of Maat is the essence of the spiritual being within the African worldview. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Maat is a comprehensive construct that existed throughout ancient Egyptian civilization. Cosmologically, maat is the principle of order that informs the creation of the universe. Religiously, maat is a goddess or neter representing order or balance. Last, philosophically, maat is a moral and ethical principle that all Egyptians were expected to embody in their daily actions toward family, community, nation, environment, and god. This work extends maat beyond the boundaries of ancient Egyptian culture and tests its conceptual elasticity by developing it into an analytical tool for studying classical African cosmological knowledge and how it relates to cultural expression. It focuses on the conceptualization of maat as the foundation of the universe and then uses the manner in which maat appears in ancient Egyptian culture as a basis for distinguishing patterns within classical African knowledge. This pattern contains 10 characteristics or dimensions: sacred, symbolic, visual, functional, moral, oral, communal, rhythmic, multidimensional, and holistic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]