Hold the date: Library Futures, Cultural Heritage & Knowledge Systems Resilience
An international symposium
University of Victoria, British Columbia · Canada
April 29 and 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
Event structure
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;
- how societies preserve records, archives, cultural memory, and heritage across generations;
- 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.