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In Virginia, former Gov. L. Douglas Wilder accused the state’s library agency of racism for “its slow pace in processing and publicly presenting records from his tenure as the nation’s first elected Black governor” (Associated Press, 2020). The State Librarian responded that this was just a lapse in protocols and framed it as a budget issue and staff turnover. However, “Library of Virginia has been processing papers from his gubernatorial successors before finishing work on his” (Associated Press, 2020). Recently, the Alabama State Department of Archives and History acknowledged their participation in systemic racism, epistemicide, and their history of privileging White voices over those of Alabama African-Americans.

Epistemicide is the killing, silencing, annihilation, or devaluing of a way of knowing (Patin, Sebastian, Yeon, & Bertolini, 2020). Conceptualization and analytic application of epistemicide has an established tradition in a number of social science fields, but information scientists have only recently acknowledged epistemicide (Oliphant, 2021; Patin et al., 2020; Patin, Sebastian, Yeon, Bertolini, & Grimm, 2021). Building from our recent identification of the existence of epistemicide within the IS field (Patin et al., 2020), this work challenges the information field to become an epistemologically just space working to correct the systemic silencing of certain ways of knowing.

This chapter examines the four types of epistemic injustices—testimonial, hermeneutical, participatory, and curricular—occurring within libraries and archives and argues for a path forward to address these injustices within our programs, services, and curricula. It looks to digital humanities and to reevaluations of professional standards and LIS education to stop epistemicide and its harms. This chapter demonstrates how to affirm the power and experience of Black lives and highlight their experiences through the careful acquisition, collection, documentation, and publishing of relevant historical materials. Addressing epistemicide is critical for information professionals because we task ourselves with handling knowledge from every field. There has to be a reckoning before the paradigm can truly shift; if there is no acknowledgment of injustice, there is no room for justice.

This paper aims to identify and conceptualize a set of relational capabilities that school libraries in the Alentejo region of Portugal develop for acquiring new knowledge that exists externally in the wider community.

A qualitative research design operationalized via case studies was followed for the empirical analysis. Empirical findings are based on the analysis of the 84 narrative reports submitted by school libraries as part of a national performance evaluation exercise that took place between 2010 and 2012. Data analysis followed the techniques of inductive data categorization, within case-analysis, and cross-case analysis.

The exploration of the relational capabilities that school libraries in the Alentejo region of Portugal develop for acquiring new knowledge that exists externally in the community resulted in the identification of relationships that school libraries in the region have established to acquire new knowledge: connecting with and supporting organizations committed to civic engagement; facilitating discussions about challenging issues through strategic partnerships; convening community conversations to identify shared concerns and solutions; and embracing local culture to foster endogenous development.

The ability to seek and recognize the value of new and external knowledge, assimilate it and apply it to organizational ends has been traditionally linked to the concept of absorptive capacity. While absorptive capacity literature in business settings is prolific, literature that focuses on school libraries’ ability to identify and explore external knowledge and applying it to improve their performance is scarce. Focusing on the specific context of the Alentejo region of Portugal as an archetypical rural area, this paper identifies how knowledge existing externally in the community is absorbed by rural school libraries through specific relational capabilities that reflect school libraries’ community orientation and engagement in participatory processes that develop social resilience.