What do you mean Knowledge Environments?

Over the past few years, as a faculty member at the University of Michigan School of Information, I have been working with colleagues to re-envision our curriculum in the areas that have been traditionally described as “LIS”, or Librarianship and Information Science, and “ARM”, or Archives and Records Management. (Actual traditionalists would likely call it Library and Information Science, but since the various configurations of institutions described by the term “library” is actually rather capacious, I prefer to say “librarianship,” which refers to the practices of working as a librarian rather than in a building that has Library written above the door.)

The outcome of some of these conversations has been the re-envisioning of our courses that fit in these areas under a common rubric that we have dubbed LAKES for Librarianship, Archives, and Knowledge Environments in Society.

The first two elements are familiar to many, but the third - “knowledge environments” - may not be. So, what do we mean, “knowledge environments”? All memory institutions, those organizations that Trevor Owens has described as “the institutions that function to keep alive and enable access to and use of cultural memory,”¹ have been challenged by the rapid conversion toward digital media, information, and networked communications technologies. As more and more cultural materials are born digital or digitally reformatted, we see increasing needs for a new generations of digital archivists and digital preservation specialists to manage these collections. In repositioning libraries, archives, and other traditional anchor institutions of humanities research, Sidonie Smith describes the proliferation of digital collections and digitized resources as “knowledge environments,” which “increasingly impact how academic humanists think about their projects of scholarly inquiry and their vehicles of scholarly publication.”² As these knowledge environments become more ubiquitous, the current landscape for digital scholarship in the humanities has also matured, even developing into new “digital infrastructure” for some areas of humanities inquiry.³ The new generation of scholars and stewards must navigate these knowledge environments, learn how to learn about new tools, use the tools as part of a normal problem solving routine in the management of digital collections, and learn how these tools can be used to support core archival, digital curation, and digital preservation values such as provenance and authenticity and core functions, such as collection development, description, and access. No other graduate archival program has developed a similar suite of curricular modules and leading digital curation tools to support the Master’s-level education of new digital archivists and curators or has disseminated these materials as a reusable, national resource freely available to the educational community.

Thus we’re choosing “knowledge environments” as a more accessible, inclusive, and hospitable term for what others may call “cultural heritage institutions,” “knowledge infrastructures,” “epistemic infrastructure,” or “big L” librarainship.

Endnotes

1. Trevor Owens, After Disruption: A Future for Cultural Memory (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2024), p. 2. Available at https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.12410213. ↩

2. Sidonie Smith, Manifesto for the Humanities: Transforming Doctoral Education in Good Enough Times (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2015), pp. 43–45. Available at https://doi.org/10.3998/dcbooks.13607059.0001.001. ↩

3. Donald J. Waters, “The Emerging Digital Infrastructure for Research in the Humanities,” International Journal on Digital Libraries 24 (2023): 87–102, at https://doi.org/10.1007/s00799-022-00332-3. ↩