Save the Date: Library Futures Symposium, Knowledge Systems Resilience
Colleagues,
I share below an announcement for an international symposium that will explore several issues of pressing concern to the CNI community, including trust in evidence and expertise, preservation and stewardship of cultural memory, and ethical and resilient AI-enabled knowledge systems.
The event will be cohosted by the Kula Library Futures Academy and the University of Victoria Libraries & Art Collections, in cooperation with the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR). CNI served as a cooperating organization for the Kula Academy launch event in 2025.
More information is at https://www.uvic.ca/library/about-us/kula-academy/library-futures-cultural-heritage-knowledge-systems-resilience/index.php.
-Diane Goldenberg-Hart, CNI
~ HOLD THE DATE ~
LIBRARY FUTURES, CULTURAL HERITAGE & KNOWLEDGE SYSTEMS RESILIENCE
An International Symposium
University of Victoria, British Columbia · Canada
April 29-30, 2027
The Kula: Library Futures Academy at the University of Victoria Libraries & Art Collections, in partnership with the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR), will bring together an international gathering of leaders, scholars, knowledge holders, and practitioners to address a question of growing urgency:
How do we build knowledge systems that can not only survive, but also shape, the future?
Academic and research libraries, archives, museums, and other custodians of cultural heritage are situated at the crossroads of knowledge, technology, culture, research, and public life. As the conditions for the creation, governance, preservation, and access to knowledge undergo radical change, their role is being fundamentally rethought.
This symposium will gather an international community to explore the future of libraries as critical knowledge infrastructure and their role in sustaining:
Knowledge sovereignty
Research and scholarly freedom
Indigenous and community knowledge
Digital and documentary memory
Archives and cultural heritage
Preservation and stewardship of cultural memory
Trust in evidence and expertise
Ethical and resilient AI-enabled knowledge systems
The conversation will span from the local to the global, and address institutional practices as well as questions of infrastructure, policy, governance, and collective action. It will explore how knowledge is generated and accessed, as well as how societies preserve records, archives, cultural memory, and heritage across generations; moreover, it asks how these memory and information systems must evolve in an era of technological, environmental, geopolitical, and epistemic disruption.
This is not a conventional conference: the symposium will be a focused and facilitated intellectual convening of leaders and practitioners designed to create new relationships and identify common opportunities for action at scale. It invites all those responsible for creating, stewarding, interpreting, preserving, and enabling access to the world's documentary, scholarly, archival, and cultural heritage.
It is an international gathering at a pivotal moment for libraries, archives, and cultural heritage institutions – for the future of knowledge itself.
Held on the traditional territories of the lək̓ʷəŋən Peoples, the symposium will take place at the University of Victoria on April 29-30, 2027.
Further details to follow. To keep up-to-date consider signing up for the Kula and CLIR mailing lists.
Jonathan B.
Jonathan B. Bengtson OXON, FRSC
University Librarian
250-721-8211
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2369-6955
We acknowledge and respect the Lək̓ʷəŋən (Songhees and Esquimalt) Peoples on whose territory the university stands, and the Lək̓ʷəŋən and W̱SÁNEĆ Peoples whose historical relationships with the land continue to this day.
