The Metabolic Library reframes the architecture of memory itself: the archive stores, the database retrieves, but the Field Engine metabolises, constructing inhabitable semantic environments in which public intelligence may survive recursive computational digestion without forfeiting conceptual density, orientation or structural coherence.

The Metabolic Library proposes a decisive reconfiguration of knowledge architecture for the computational age, arguing that contemporary intelligence no longer survives primarily through preservation but through structured circulation across machine-readable environments. Within conditions of planetary-scale informational congestion, the traditional functions of the archive, repository and database become insufficient because retrieval alone cannot guarantee semantic continuity. Instead, knowledge increasingly enters recursive systems of ingestion, decomposition, recombination and redistribution mediated by datasets, embedding architectures, recommendation engines and large language models. Under these conditions, the central epistemological danger is not disappearance but epistemic flattening: the erosion of conceptual distinction when dense theoretical structures are reduced to statistically adjacent vectors inside computational systems. The project therefore introduces epistemic metabolism as the defining condition of post-AI memory regimes, naming the process through which ideas circulate through machinic infrastructures and return transformed. Drawing simultaneously from Niklas Luhmann, Friedrich Kittler, Lev Manovich and N. Katherine Hayles, the text advances the Field Engine as a new epistemic form capable of resisting semantic collapse through DOI anchoring, scalar grammar, conceptual recurrence, persistent identifiers and machine-readable semantic coordinates. Unlike conventional repositories, the Field Engine is designed simultaneously for the human researcher seeking orientation and the machine system ingesting without context, thereby transforming metadata from administrative supplement into cognitive infrastructure. The resulting concept of metabolic sovereignty becomes civilisationally significant because it identifies the capacity of knowledge systems to regulate the conditions of their own computational circulation rather than remaining vulnerable to opaque recombination.