Documenting the Anthropocene: Connecting Attenborough’s Environmental Heritage with Global Open Knowledge Systems

De Robbio, Antonella Documenting the Anthropocene: Connecting Attenborough’s Environmental Heritage with Global Open Knowledge Systems. Informatics Studies | ISSN: 2583-8954 (Online), 2320-530X (Print), 2026, vol. 13, n. 2, pp. 31-42. [Journal article (Paginated)]

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English abstract

As Sir David Attenborough reaches his centenary, his unparalleled natural history corpus constitutes one of the world’s richest repositories of biodiversity knowledge and ecological memory. Yet, despite its immense educational and scientific value, this vast documentation remains largely confined to commercial broadcasting platforms, with limited integration into academic discovery systems, research infrastructures, and Open Science environments. The author examines the growing disconnect between peer-reviewed environmental knowledge preserved in open-access repositories and Attenborough’s documentation of global biodiversity. Drawing on concepts from information ecology, knowledge organization, green librarianship, and the IFLA 2030. It is the absence of semantic, metadata, and discovery-layer integration that limits the scholarly and public use of this unique knowledge resource. The author proposes strategies for preserving, organizing, and enhancing the discoverability of Attenborough’s corpus, including the development of an AI-enabled Attenborough-LLM, thereby transforming a globally significant environmental heritage into an accessible resource for biodiversity research, education, conservation, and ecological literacy.

Item type: Journal article (Paginated)
Keywords: Global Green Librarianship; Information Ecology; Open Science Infrastructures; IFLA 2030 Agenda; Agentic AI; Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG); David Attenborough, Biodiversity, Conservation, Environmental Informatics, Knowledge management (KM).
Subjects: B. Information use and sociology of information > BC. Information in society.
B. Information use and sociology of information > BF. Information policy
Depositing user: Antonella De Robbio
Date deposited: 24 Jun 2026 17:20
Last modified: 24 Jun 2026 17:20
URI: http://hdl.handle.net/10760/47875

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