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(Not) Part of the System: Resolving Epistemic Disconnect Through Archival Reference

Information seeking practices of conspiracists are examined by introducing the new archival user group of “conspiracist researchers.” The epistemic commitments of archival knowledge organization (AKO), rooted in provenance and access/secrecy, fundamentally conflict with the epistemic features of conspiracism, namely: mistrust of authority figures and institutions, accompanying overreliance on firsthand inquiry, and a tendency towards indicative mood/confirmation bias. Through interviews with reference personnel working at two state archives in the American west, I illustrate that the reference interaction is a vital turning point for the conspiracist researcher. Reference personnel can build trust with conspiracist researchers by displaying epistemic empathy and subverting hegemonic archival logics. The burden of bridging the epistemic gap through archival user education thus falls almost exclusively onto reference personnel. Domain analysis is presented as one possible starting point for developing an archival knowledge organization system (AKOS) that could be more epistemically flexible.