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Paper short abstract:

This slightly "meta" analysis uses knowledge repositories today to learn how similar institutions were used in the past to scale-up widespread cultural change. Today's digital tools allow us to better piece together complex processes of the past to uncover how they could be so effective.

Paper long abstract:

While knowledge repositories might seem static, their histories can reveal less confining associations. Focusing on a nineteenth century case-study, I will illustrate how the director of the botanical gardens and museum in Christiania (today's Oslo) worked to strengthen botanical and horticultural knowledge in various ways to affect change in multiple levels of the Norwegian population. Professor Frederik Christian Schübeler believed that existing knowledge should actively empower people to become more self-sufficient to protect themselves for times of political or climate-induced famine. Though our current aspirations may be different, we can learn a lot from Schübeler's processes to understand how knowledge institutions or repositories can build/erect/facilitate projects that successfully scale up public knowledge and engagement with for example plants and nature. Today, the secrets of Schübeler's success with museums/botanical gardens lies in libraries and archives along with potentially very interesting transdisciplinary information he gathered about plants. In this talk, I will demonstrate how the digital tools of today have allowed me to further explore both the nuance and widescale impact of Schübeler's influence. The digitalization of books and archives opens the field for new methods and rates of exploring and understanding familiar histories and allow for new insights. The power of this accessibility can also be reflected in the opportunities that Schübeler's work of opening and activating collections provided for the public in the latter half of the nineteenth century. By fostering new ways of applying knowledge, I argue that knowledge repositories can spearhead widespread change in a wider culture.