Librarianship of Compost

This post is part of a series that translates ecological narratives, biological concepts and field notes into analytical tools for libraries, archives, and museums, related to knowledge and memory management. Check all the posts in this section's index.

The Preservation Reflex and Its Limits

Since the late nineteenth century, librarianship and archival science have inherited an Enlightenment obsession with permanence. The archive became a fortress against entropy, a material embodiment of the belief that stability equals truth. The disciplinary language of "fixity," "authenticity," and "integrity" translated metaphysical ideals into technical standards: microfilm duplication, bit-level preservation, redundancy, migration, and cold storage.

What we call preservation is often a ritual of control — an attempt to freeze time, to safeguard order against the organic volatility of use, loss, and reinterpretation.

This preservation reflex has produced impressive infrastructures, but it has also impoverished our epistemology of memory. It defines disappearance as failure, and transformation as corruption. In doing so, it mirrors the industrial paradigm that seeks to dominate the material world by resisting entropy rather than metabolizing it. As scholars like Derrida (Archive Fever), Caitlin DeSilvey (Curated Decay), and Michelle Caswell have argued, such reflexes conceal their own violence: the will to immobilize life, to purify complexity, to convert the dynamic into the durable.

To move beyond this reflex does not mean abandoning preservation, but decolonizing it: recognizing that the preservation ideal arose within specific cosmologies — those of empire, industry, and textual dominance — and that alternative models of continuity already exist elsewhere, particularly within ecological and Indigenous epistemologies.

Decomposition as Information Flow

Decomposition is not destruction. In ecological systems, it is the most intricate form of information flow. Organic matter breaks down and redistributes its data through molecular exchanges, microbial metabolism, and chemical patterning. In this process, the forest reconfigures meaning: what once stood as a leaf, a feather, or a body becomes nutrient, pigment, and signal for other beings. The archive of the forest is relational and metabolic, not static.

Translating this insight to the field of memory work suggests a radical reinterpretation: decomposition as appraisal and redistribution. What the forest "decides" to preserve is not predetermined; it emerges from contingent interactions — humidity, temperature, species composition, temporal cycles. Similarly, knowledge systems could be designed to select for relevance and potential reuse rather than for indefinite endurance. The informational system becomes a metabolism: a dynamic equilibrium between retention and transformation, guided by context rather than by universal rules.

In digital preservation, every migration, format shift, and checksum variation already constitutes a form of decomposition. What changes is not the fact of information, but its structure and relation. Instead of perceiving these processes as degradation, ecosemiotic archivistics reads them as evidence of life — as signals of an information ecology that breathes, mutates, and adapts.

Humus and Metadata Residues

The final product of decomposition in the forest, humus, appears inert but contains extraordinary informational density. It encodes the chemical and microbial signatures of its origins — the invisible biography of what once lived. Ecologists extract from humus clues about species composition, climate history, and land use, revealing that decay is not erasure but a palimpsest.

In library and archival systems, metadata residues perform a similar role. Log files, version histories, and formatting remnants preserve traces of processes that have reshaped a record through time. These are not noise; they are the semantic compost of the information ecosystem — the evidence of prior use, transformation, and survival. An ecosemiotic approach would treat such residues not as clutter to be sanitized, but as legitimate carriers of meaning. A record's biography includes its migrations, its degradations, and even its corruptions. A corrupted checksum is not failure; it is a chemical trace of technological metabolism.

Integrating these residues into description would require an epistemic shift: from identifying the "authentic original" to mapping the life cycle of the document. The focus moves from identity to genealogy, from fixity to flow. What is cataloged is not a thing, but a trajectory — a process of ongoing negotiation between stability and change.

Designing for Decay

Preservation systems have been built to resist decay; few have been built to design with it. Yet to accept the forest's lesson means to imagine decay-aware infrastructures — repositories and metadata schemas that incorporate transformation as part of their logic.

This could take multiple forms: curated impermanence (data objects that expire by design, leaving behind structured residues or summaries); ephemerality indexes (metadata fields recording expected lifespan and decay protocol), relational residues (pointers to derivative objects, context notes, or successor records — akin to nutrient chains in soil), or temporal ontologies (RDF structures capable of expressing decay as an event rather than as a loss, using predicates such as "was transformed into," "left trace in," o "superseded by."

These are not metaphors but viable design principles. Time-bound triples, deprecating identifiers, and decay logs could formalize an ethics of disappearance inside digital preservation frameworks. Rather than aspiring to immortality, a library or archive would model itself after the ecological principle of regeneration: continuity through recycling.

This proposal resonates with DeSilvey's "curated decay," but extends it into the semantic domain. In ecosemiotic archivistics, decay becomes a descriptive property — an encoded relation, not a failure state.

From Custodians to Composters

To accept decomposition as epistemic practice also transforms the professional role. The archivist or librarian ceases to be a custodian of static integrity and becomes a semantic composter — a caretaker of cycles, residues, and regenerations. The goal is not permanence but fertility: ensuring that what fades enriches what comes next.

This shift redefines ethics. Instead of preserve everything, the guiding question becomes "how should this decompose?" Different contexts demand different rhythms of decay. Some data may require long dormancy; others may dissolve quickly, feeding derivative processes. The professional task is to design those trajectories responsibly.

Such an ethos aligns with critiques of universal standards — ISO models, OAIS, or TRAC — that presume homogeneity across cultural, ecological, and technological settings. Composting is situated: it depends on local climate, material composition, and care practices. Similarly, a digital preservation plan should arise from the ecology of its context: the technological soil, the social humidity, the ethical pH.

In this view, librarianship becomes a form of environmental semiosis. Professionals manage not collections, but ecosystems of relations — and their expertise lies in knowing how to tend decay without erasing meaning.

A Theory of Resilient Forgetting

If the preservation reflex is rooted in fear of loss, ecosemiotic archivistics proposes resilient forgetting as a counter-principle. In resilient forgetting, continuity is achieved not through identity but through transformation. The past persists by feeding the present, not by surviving unchanged.

This logic can be traced across disciplines. In system theory, graceful degradation describes how complex systems maintain function under partial failure. In ecology, succession replaces destruction with regeneration. Anthropology recognizes that disappearance can be a culturally meaningful act. Transposed into memory work, resilient forgetting means structuring information systems to accommodate mutation without crisis. Every deletion, every migration, every broken link becomes part of the record's biography.

This principle also converges with decolonial archival thought. To design for disappearance is to acknowledge the right to opacity (Glissant), the politics of non-access (Caswell & Cifor), and the ethics of refusal (Tuck & Yang). Some records must vanish; some memories must rot quietly in order to nourish others. Forgetting, in this sense, is not the opposite of memory but its composting.

Methodological Implications

Adopting an ecosemiotic framework would have concrete consequences for the field: metadata reform (incorporating decay indicators, temporal relations, and provenance of transformation within existing standards), appraisal redesign (moving from criteria of significance and representativeness to ecological fitness — relevance within evolving informational ecosystems), infrastructure ecology (encouraging distributed, modular repositories that self-balance and self-prune; resilience through redundancy that decomposes intelligently), ethical frameworks (integrating responsible disappearance and situated decay into professional codes of ethics, parallel to confidentiality and access), and pedagogy (training professionals as stewards of informational cycles — capable of reading data stratigraphy, mapping residue flows, and designing with impermanence.)

Such measures would not replace existing preservation protocols but layer them with ecological awareness. The result is not chaos, but a new equilibrium: archives that breathe, age, and regenerate.

A Librarianship of Compost

Compost is neither waste nor monument; it is process — the ongoing conversation between death and fertility. A librarianship of compost would treat every record as a living compound, part of a metabolic chain that links data, context, and community.

In this model, catalogs resemble soils: dense with invisible histories, open to infiltration, shaped by climate and care. Metadata becomes the humus of knowledge — fertile precisely because it decomposes.

Such a vision requires humility. To curate decay is to abandon fantasies of total preservation and to embrace the ethics of ephemerality. It also demands courage: to build systems that will change, fail, and feed their successors. But this is not defeat. It is alignment with the living world — a recognition that endurance depends on transformation.

The forest does not remember by resisting time; it remembers by becoming soil. If libraries and archives wish to remain meaningful in a world that is itself decomposing, they must learn to do the same.

  This entry mirrors the chronicle "The Forest Does Not Forget," a narrative reflection on the same theme.