Call for Papers

Call for Papers, Posters, and Demos

The Web Archiving and Digital Libraries Workshop (WADL 2026) will be held in conjunction with the 2026 ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL 2026).

About the workshop

The Web Archiving and Digital Libraries Workshop is back at JCDL. WADL 2026 will bring together researchers and practitioners from academia, industry, government, libraries, archives, museums, and other cultural heritage organizations to discuss the concepts, methods, systems, standards, and shared challenges that shape web archiving.

Web archiving and digital libraries intersect across the full life cycle of digital resources: creation and authoring; uploading and publishing; crawling and collection; compression and formatting; storage and preservation; analysis and indexing; discovery and access. WADL 2026 will also address processes and tools for preserving resources that challenge conventional collecting workflows, including social media, scholarly and government datasets, dynamic and mobile content, 3D objects, and online art.

The workshop aims to:

  • build a diverse, international community connecting web archiving and digital libraries;
  • share useful methods, systems, tools, standards, and practical lessons;
  • identify future directions for research and practice;
  • improve the quality, accessibility, and sustainability of web archives;
  • support open dissemination of workshop contributions; and
  • foster collaborations, projects, and proposals across institutions and sectors.

Topics of interest

We welcome work on all aspects of web archiving and digital libraries. Topics include, but are not limited to:

  • special-event archiving and collection building;
  • crawling dynamic, mobile, and online art content;
  • social media archiving;
  • national and international perspectives on web archiving;
  • archival standards, protocols, systems, and tools;
  • artificial intelligence and automation for archiving, description, discovery, and retrieval;
  • archival metadata, description, and classification;
  • machine-friendly discovery of archived resources;
  • interoperability among web archiving systems;
  • extraction, analysis, and reuse of archival records;
  • community building and collaborative collecting;
  • diversity and representation in web archives; and
  • ethical, legal, and social questions in web archiving.

We particularly encourage submissions from practitioners, students, interdisciplinary teams, and contributors whose work connects research with operational experience.

Submission types

WADL 2026 invites the following types of contributions:

  • Short papers: Completed or ongoing research, case studies, system descriptions, evaluations, or lessons from practice.
    Length: 2+ pages

  • Position papers: Well-supported perspectives, provocations, emerging challenges, or proposals for future research and community action.
    Length: 2+ pages

  • Posters: Early-stage work, works in progress, project overviews, or ideas that would benefit from focused discussion and feedback.
    Length: ≤ 2 pages

  • Demonstrations: Tools, systems, collections, workflows, interfaces, or other practical contributions suitable for an interactive presentation.
    Length: ≤ 2 pages

Submissions should be written in English and submitted as PDF files. Authors are strongly encouraged to prepare submissions using the ACM sigconf two-column proceedings format. LaTeX authors should use the acmart document class with the sigconf option; Word authors should use the corresponding ACM proceedings template. Using this format will help reviewers assess submissions consistently and will simplify preparation of accepted contributions. Submissions prepared in another clear, professional format will still be considered, provided they respect the applicable page limit.

Submit through https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=wadl2026

Each submission will be reviewed by members of the WADL program committee. Review criteria will include relevance to the workshop, clarity, significance, technical or practical soundness, and potential to stimulate useful discussion.

At least one author of each accepted contribution must register for the workshop and present the work either in person or online.

Important dates

All deadlines are at 11:59 p.m. Anywhere on Earth (UTC-12).

  • Submission deadline: September 16, 2026
  • Anticipated Author notification: October 1, 2026
  • Workshop: October 16, 2026

Workshop format

WADL 2026 is planned as a full-day hybrid workshop featuring invited speakers, presentations of selected papers, posters, demonstrations, a panel or structured community discussion, and substantial time for questions and exchange.

Paper presentations are expected to be approximately 10-15 minutes, followed by discussion. The hybrid poster and demonstration session will connect in-person and online participants through shared poster pages and discussion spaces. Accepted poster contributors may be asked to provide a poster PDF and may optionally provide a short video. Further presentation instructions will be sent with acceptance notifications.

Publication and access

Accepted contributions will be listed on the WADL 2026 website with titles, authors, abstracts, and, with author permission, links to final PDFs. The organizers plan to deposit accepted contributions in an open institutional repository so that the workshop record remains accessible after the event.

WADL workshop proceedings are intended for timely community dissemination and should not prevent authors from submitting substantially extended work to archival conferences or journals, subject to the policies of those venues.

The organizers also intend to invite selected contributions to submit substantially extended versions to a post-workshop publication venue. Details will be announced when confirmed.

Organizers

Questions about the workshop or submissions may be directed to either organizer.