The Digital Library Federation (DLF) is a robust and diverse community of practitioners who advance research, teaching, and learning through the application of digital library research, technology, and services.

The DLF Forum is an annual meeting where the digital library, archive, and museum communities come together to discover better methods of working through sharing and collaboration. It serves as a resource and catalyst among digital library developers, project managers, and all who are invested in digital library issues. We are currently seeking proposals for the 2015 DLF Forum program, which will be held in Vancouver, BC.

For the 2015 DLF Forum, the Program Planning Committee requests proposals within the broad framework of digital collections, infrastructure, resources, and organizational priorities.

The Forum traditionally has no overarching theme so that we can craft a program that speaks to current issues of interest to our community. We depend on contributors to focus proposals on action-oriented topics targeted towards a practitioner audience, considering the aspects of design, management, implementation, assessment, and collaboration.

Suggested topical areas for 2015 include:

  • Linked data implementations
  • Collaborative digital projects across GLAM institutions
  • Innovative approaches to engaging users and reusing data and collections (e.g., data visualization, mapping, crowdsourcing, citizen science)
  • Systems architecture, both hardware and code
  • Open data, open access, or open educational resources

This is not a prescriptive list; we encourage you to be creative, collaborative, and collegial. For more detailed examples, please see the 2014 DLF Forum program.

Session Genres

  • Presentations and Panels: Traditional lecture format with question-and-answer sessions. Speakers are requested to use only half of the allocated time for the presentation, including how they wish to engage the DLF community in their work. The second half of the session should focus on conversations about next steps, engagement with the community, and clarification of points raised during the presentation.
  • Workshops: In-depth, hands-on training about a tool, technique, workflow, etc. You can recommend a topic or trainer, or you can volunteer to share your own expertise.
  • Project Updates: 20-minute presentations that provide an opportunity to share the status or recent accomplishments of current projects with the community.
  • Working Sessions: Creative problem solvers, including project managers, developers, and/or administrators, gather to address a specific problem. This does not have to be a computational problem. The approach can be applied to workflow issues, metadata transformations, or other complex problems that would benefit from a collective, dynamic solution approach.
  • Snapshots: 7-minute presentations meant to engage and energize the audience. These can be reports of works in progress, a new tool under development, questions, provocations, and more. Presenters are asked to give a dynamic overview of their topic in a quick timeframe, with up to 24 slides. Accepted snapshots will be grouped together based on an overarching theme or idea, with time for audience questions at the end of each group.
  • Community Idea Exchange: A modified poster session plus lightning round. Presenters will have the opportunity to interact with Forum participants to discuss their current research projects, and/or demonstrate tools or services they have developed or are using in their digital library environment. Demos must include a poster element. Additionally, presenters are encouraged to give a one minute “lightning talk” on their poster during the lightning round at the beginning of the session.

Proposal Submission Guidelines and Evaluation Procedures

Complete proposals should be submitted using the online submission form by 5:00 PM EST 11:59 pm PT on June 22, 2015. Proposals must include a title, session leader, session genre, proposal description (maximum 300 words), and proposal abstract (maximum 100 words).

After an initial review by the Program Planning Committee, proposals will be posted on the DLF website for community polling. The community vote will be taken into consideration, and the Program Planning Committee will make the final decisions. Those that submitted complete proposals will be notified of their status by mid-August. Presenters will be guaranteed a registration place.

Participation is open to all those interested in contributing to and playing an active part in the successful future of digital libraries, museums, and archives services and collections. We consider proposals from DLF members and non-members and seek to have an inclusive program.

The 2015 DLF Forum will be held in Vancouver, BC at the Pinnacle Hotel Vancouver Harbourfront, October 26–28.

The call for proposals for the DLF Liberal Arts Colleges Preconference is also open until June 22.