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JCDL 2004
JCDL.2004
Digital Libraries Summit
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Heritage

From the Hilton El Conquistador, back to the commons.

A short history of the community that gathers under the JCDL banner — and of the twenty-two quiet years that shaped the digital edition.

  1. 2001

    The joint proposal

    ACM's JCDL, IEEE's ADL, and the Open Archives community agree to unify their annual meetings under a single banner — The Joint Conference on Digital Libraries.

  2. 2001–2003

    Three inaugural editions

    Roanoke, Portland, and Houston host the early editions. The format stabilizes: full papers, short papers, posters, demos, and working panels.

  3. 2004

    Tucson

    JCDL 2004 is held at the Hilton El Conquistador in Tucson, Arizona, hosted by the University of Arizona. The conference theme — "Global Reach and Diverse Impact" — becomes the community's north star.

  4. 2005–2019

    Fifteen years of steady work

    The field matures. Institutional repositories go mainstream. The ETD movement quietly crosses a billion pages. The conference moves annually across North America, Europe, and Asia.

  5. 2020–2023

    The hybrid interregnum

    The pandemic forces a rapid pivot to virtual formats. The community learns what travels well online (panels, demos, reading groups) and what does not (hallway conversations, the unplanned collaborations that make a career).

  6. 2024

    The twentieth-anniversary retrospective

    An informal reading group reassembles the Tucson program committee on a quiet Zoom call. The minutes of that call become the seed document for the 2026 relaunch.

  7. 2026

    Digital reunion

    JCDL returns in fully digital form. Same rigor, more reach. The conference is streamed worldwide, with simultaneous tracks scheduled across time zones and a permanent archive of every paper, panel, and keynote.

Conference location, 2004

Hilton El Conquistador · Tucson, AZ

The original edition was hosted by the University of Arizona's AI Lab, under the leadership of Hsinchun Chen. The Conquistador remains a small but fond reference point in community memory.

// conference_minutes.txt
$ git log --since="2004-06-07" --until="2004-06-11"
commit 0004-jcdl-tucson
Author: organizing_committee@jcdl2004.org
Date: Mon Jun 7 09:00:00 2004

+ adopted theme: "Global Reach and Diverse Impact"
+ announced four best-paper awards
+ reaffirmed commitment to the open-knowledge commons