What Counts as a Document?

This post is part of a series that reviews decolonialism in libraries, archives and other similar spaces, from the perspective of the Global South and the margins, and how colonialism affects collections, staffing, services, activities, policies, and results. Check all the posts in this section's index.

Introduction

In the world of libraries and archives, the definition of a "document" has long been constrained by certain assumptions: that it is printed or digital, that it carries the seal of an academic institution or a recognized publishing house, that it has been formally authored, classified, and sanctioned.

In this framework, anything that does not fit these parameters —oral traditions, landscapes, embodied knowledge, collective memory— tends to be dismissed as unreliable, unstructured, or even nonexistent in terms of knowledge and memory management.

This is not just an oversight. It may be considered an act of epistemic violence.

The idea that knowledge must be written, stored, and institutionally recognized to be "valid" is a historical construction — one rooted in colonial power, in the expansion of state control, in the bureaucratic need to classify and contain. This bias is a direct result of literocentrism — a term I have coined to express the privileging of written text over other forms of knowledge transmission.

And yet, when we look beyond this rigid framework, we find that the world has always been filled with documents that do not fit within library shelves or digital repositories.

A Library Without Shelves: The Forest as Archive

In The Forest as a Library: What Trees, Soils, and Rivers Remember, I explored the idea that landscapes themselves are knowledge systems — holding memory in the rings of trees, the underground connections of mycelia, the layers of soil, the movement of rivers... These are not poetic metaphors; each organism in the rainforest is part of an actual archive of information, historical records encoded both in nature and in the cultures of the many peoples living among them.

And yet, because they are not formatted into books or digitized into databases, they remain invisible to the institutional, official, hegemonic structures that define what is worth preserving — and what is deemed to be forgotten.

The problem, however, goes beyond nature. Entire civilizations have preserved, stored, and transmitted knowledge through forms that libraries and archives continue to ignore. Maps traced into animal hides or in haircuts, histories built into architecture, cosmologies encoded into textiles and baskets, genealogies and legal systems passed down through oral governance and songs — each of these represents vast, intricate bodies of knowledge and memory.

Yet they are often treated as folklore, legend, or mere cultural artifacts rather than what they truly are.

The Tyranny of the Written Word

For centuries, the written word has been privileged over all other forms of information transmission. The assumption that something is only real if it is documented in text has led to profound losses — not only of knowledge itself but of the communities and traditions that sustain it.

Orality, for example, is dismissed as unreliable or anecdotal. Yet it contains detailed scientific knowledge —about medicinal plants, ecological cycles, climate patterns— that have been tested and refined for generations. A book on botany is considered valid; a healer's knowledge, passed through spoken word and embodied practice, is not. Why? Because one fits the hegemonic model, and the other does not.

This is literocentrism at work.

Who Gets to Decide What Counts?

Librarians, archivists, and information professionals play a crucial role in defining and enforcing what is considered a document — and by extension, what is considered knowledge.

Such power is not neutral, no matter how often "neutrality" is claimed by those who manage knowledge and memory.

By recognizing only written, system-sanctioned, academic texts as valid, the field of librarianship has historically reinforced systems of colonialism and exclusion. It has sidelined the experiences of Indigenous communities, the wisdom of local historians, the legitimacy of non-Western epistemologies. It has treated knowledge as something that must be stored in books, in databases, in institutional repositories, rather than something lived, practiced, and passed on beyond the constraints of the written record.

Breaking the Boundaries of Documentation

We must begin to expand what we consider to be a document.

We must reject the notion that only certain kinds of knowledge are worth preserving.

We must recognize that stories carried in bodies, in ceremonies, in landscapes, in languages on the verge of extinction, are just as vital as any book in our collections.

This means expanding cataloging systems to recognize non-written, non-digitized knowledge. It means creating ethical frameworks that respect the sovereignty of knowledge holders. It means supporting community-driven archiving practices, rather than extractive models that take knowledge without giving back. It means advocating for policy changes that challenge the colonial structures still embedded in information science.

If knowledge can be stored in roots and leaves, in oral speeches, in traditions that predate the printing press, then why are we still pretending that only books and servers matter?

If librarianship is truly about preserving knowledge, then what will it take to finally recognize the knowledge that has been here all along?

  This entry mirrors the chronicle "The Forest as a Library," a narrative reflection on the same theme.