How Can Libraries Bridge Heritage and Community Memory in the AI Era? A 5A Framework

Artificial intelligence is reshaping how cultural heritage is digitized, organized, retrieved, interpreted, and reused, while also raising concerns about weakened cultural context, algorithmic bias, limited community representation, and long-term preservation. Using an interpretive multiple-case study, this article examines four Chinese initiatives: the National Library of China’s China Memory Project, Shanghai Library’s genealogy services, the digitization of ethnic minority classics in Guangxi, and the Digital Dunhuang Open Materials Library. It proposes a 5A framework comprising Access, Awareness, Agency, Accountability, and Afterlife. Access enables cultural resources to enter the public knowledge sphere; Awareness supports contextualized understanding; Agency determines whether communities can participate in interpretation and reproduction; Accountability governs collection, algorithmic processing, access, and reuse; and Afterlife depends on preservation, provenance tracking, rights management, and sustained use. The cases reveal a distinctive pathway centered on institutional preservation, platform development, low-resource script processing, and tiered openness, but also expose gaps in community co-governance, algorithmic transparency, and user-impact evaluation. The framework reframes multicultural literacy as a shared governance capacity involving libraries, communities, and technical systems, offering an analytical tool for AI-enabled heritage projects and cross-national comparison.