A forum for the infrastructure of knowledge.
JCDL is the major international forum focusing on digital libraries and the associated technical, practical, and social issues. It encompasses the many meanings of "digital libraries" — new forms of information institutions, operational systems, novel approaches to organizing and distributing content, long-term preservation, and the theoretical models of information media that bind them together.
What the field is about.
The intended community includes everyone interested in digital libraries as infrastructure, institutions, metadata, content, services, preservation, system design, interface design, human-computer interaction, evaluation of both performance and usability, collection development, intellectual property, privacy, electronic publishing, document genres, and multimedia.
Participation is drawn from the full range of disciplines involved in digital library research and practice: computer science, electrical engineering, information science, information systems, librarianship, archival and museum practice, technology, education, medicine, intelligence analysis, social sciences, and humanities. Every domain — academia, government, industry, civil society — is invited to present or attend.
Global Reach. Diverse Impact.
The 2026 edition inherits the theme introduced in Tucson in 2004 and carries it into the fully-digital era. We are particularly interested in:
- Major national or cross-regional digital library projects
- Case studies of successful international collaboration
- Cultural preservation of unique and indigenous knowledge
- Digital library technologies in national and international security
- Intelligence and security informatics
- Cyberinfrastructure-based digital library content and services
- Digital library research for e-learning and education
- Novel, high-impact digital library projects
Six parallel stages.
Infrastructure & Systems
Repositories, federation, long-term architecture, preservation pipelines, search and retrieval at planetary scale.
Metadata & Semantics
Ontologies, FAIR principles, linked data, schema evolution, and automated enrichment with modern ML.
Culture & Preservation
Indigenous knowledge, oral histories, born-digital heritage, format migration, and ethics of access.
Users, Policy & Society
Privacy, intellectual property, open science, intelligence informatics, and digital equity.
E-Learning & Humanities
Scholarly editions, reading environments, educational collections, and computational humanities.
AI for Libraries
Retrieval-augmented catalogs, automated cataloging, conversational access, and model provenance.