The Joint Conference
on Digital Libraries,
restarted for the open-knowledge era.
Twenty-two years after the first JCDL convened in Tucson, the community reconvenes — this time entirely online. Five days, six stages, forty-two countries, and one question: what does the library owe the next century?
A serious field reunion, wearing a neon jacket.
JCDL is the major international forum for digital libraries research. Since 2004 it has brought together computer scientists, librarians, archivists, policy makers, and humanists around the infrastructure that carries human knowledge forward.
The 2026 digital edition keeps the rigor and adds the reach that physical venues cannot: simultaneous tracks across time zones, persistent community spaces, and a paper trail that lives beyond the keynote.
Three lenses that have organized every JCDL since the Tucson edition — and still do.
The 2004 theme, now the standing commitment of the digital edition.
Tracks that take the field seriously.
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.
Reading ahead of the conference.
FHIR Solves the Syntax Problem and Leaves the Hard One Untouched
The 21st Century Cures Act, signed into law in 2016, contains a requirement that reads simply but carries significant consequences: certified health informatio…
RAG Is Not a Cure — What Retrieval-Augmented Generation Actually Fixes in Biomedical Libraries
Retrieval-Augmented Generation has become the consensus answer to the question that biomedical information professionals and clinical AI developers have been a…
Genomic Data Portals and the FAIR Gap the Field Has Stopped Talking About
There is a version of the genomic data management story that the field tells about itself, and it is broadly accurate in outline. The National Center for Biote…
Categories across the field.
Fresh from the editorial desk.
The Library Catalog Was Never Neutral
The catalog has always made an argument. It argues that certain concepts are the correct way to organise knowledge. That certain vocabulary terms are the appro…
FAIR Was Never Built for Machine Learning
The FAIR Guiding Principles — Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable — emerged from a 2014 workshop at the Lorentz Center in Leiden, were formalised by…
What Born-Digital Archives Are Losing Before Anyone Notices
There is a category of loss that archivists have spent two decades naming and still have not solved: the loss that accumulates not through flood, fire, or inst…
Meet the world's leading digital-library thinkers.
3 confirmed contributors. More to come every week through May 2026.
Kyoto University — Academic Center for Computing and Media Studies · Japan
Computational Biology & AI-driven Medicine; Lisbon Institute for Advanced Systems
University of Virginia — Scholars' Lab · United States
Four awards, carried forward from Tucson.
The JCDL best-paper program, originally funded in 2004 by generous donors, returns for the digital edition. Submissions open through the standard program committee.
For the paper that best advances the vision of the Memex — integrative, bold, foundational.
Awarded to the strongest first-authored contribution by a graduate or doctoral student.
For outstanding work illustrating cross-regional collaboration and cultural reach.
For the poster that communicates a complex research idea with maximum clarity.
Five days. Six stages. One commitment.
Save your seat for the digital reunion of the JCDL community. Student and early-career rates available through May.