Mahutuvuse

Mahutuvuse is a concept used in information studies and cultural theory to describe the capacity of an information ecosystem to preserve, transmit, and transform knowledge across time and space. It treats knowledge as distributed across archives, devices, practices, and communities, rather than confined to a single container, and emphasizes durability, redundancy, and interpretive continuity.

Dimensions and mechanisms include time (historical continuity), space (distributed repositories and practices), redundancy (multiple copies and formats), accessibility (governance and interfaces), and interpretability (retaining context, metadata, and cultural meaning). Mechanisms of mahutuvuse encompass physical archives, digital repositories, cloud networks, linked data, oral histories, and routine stewardship practices such as standards adherence and data governance.

Applications and relevance span cultural heritage, scientific data management, disaster resilience, and education. The concept provides a lens for understanding how communities maintain usable knowledge through upheavals such as migrations, technological change, or systemic shocks, by leveraging diverse modalities and social practices that encode memory into artifacts, procedures, and systems.

Challenges and limitations include digital decay and format obsolescence, metadata erosion, privacy and governance concerns, and unequal access to preserving and retrieving information. Critics note that mahutuvuse is broad and multidimensional, making precise measurement difficult and risking overgeneralization when applied without careful operationalization.

Overall, mahutuvuse contributes to discussions of collective memory, long-term digital preservation, data stewardship, and resilience, offering a framework for examining how knowledge endures despite changing technologies, institutions, and contexts.