Community Memory in the Age of AI: Post-Custodial Frameworks from Kula: Library Futures Academy

Abstract

Libraries have long inherited the role of custodian: keeper of the collection, guardian of the record, arbiter of what memory endures. Yet the heritage most in need of safeguarding today — the contested, the dissonant, the politically inconvenient — rarely arrives at the library's door in a form the institution knows how to receive. It lives on phones, in private drives, in activist networks working at the edge of censorship, conflict, and climate disruption. In the age of generative AI, the ground beneath such material shifts again: fabrication grows cheaper, provenance thinner, and the line between preservation and erasure harder to hold. This paper introduces Kula: Library Futures Academy at the University of Victoria Libraries — a library-based institute of advanced studies built as a transdisciplinary collider for emerging research methods. Kula treats AI not as a neutral accelerant but as a technology requiring ethical stewardship grounded in the communities whose memories are at stake. Three initiatives anchor the approach: 1. Fellowship Programs to build new expertise in the profession; 2. LENS@UVicLib is building an endowment for digitization, metadata enhancement, and AI-enabled analysis of library collections; and; 3. Liberating Knowledge Partnerships supports co-custodial collecting — most visibly through Project 35, preserving oral histories of Indigenous leaders who negotiated Section 35 of the Canadian Constitution. One might reasonably argue that the AI moment compels libraries not to consolidate their custodianship but to distribute it: to become, in short, infrastructure for others' memory work. Whether the profession is ready for that shift is what Kula means to ask.