TOPICS | TIMELINE | GUIDELINES | FORMATS | SUBMISSION FORM
We are no longer accepting proposals for
the 2026 Web Archiving Conference.
SUSTAINABLE WEB ARCHIVING
We invite submissions that focus on all aspects of sustainable web archiving.
As the web archiving community has grown and matured, we have gained substantial experience and knowledge from collecting, preserving, and providing access to web archives. To keep up with our collective practices and continue progressing in line with the goals of responsible development, we need to emphasize and explore how our web archiving community should move in a sustainable direction.
Every aspect of the web archiving ecosystem can be considered when discussing sustainability. The carbon footprint of data storage and processing, as well as the development and maintenance of robust open-source tools and crawler technologies, are directly related to environmental sustainability.
Social sustainability is at play in user-centric design, community outreach, enhancing digital literacy, and ensuring equitable access to archived web content. Submissions are invited to confront legal and ethical dimensions of sustainability in reflections on data protection, privacy, freedom of expression, and AI regulation, as well as the FAIR and CARE principles for responsible data stewardship.
Sustainability also involves transitioning short-term projects into ongoing programs, fostering internal advocacy, and breaking down institutional silos. Evolving individual roles in web archiving programs and practices emphasize the importance of robust support for the transfer of knowledge and training in sustaining the work. We highlight the importance of lessons learned from multi-stakeholder collaborations, strategies for engagement and advocacy, inclusive practices, and transnational and cross-institutional communication.
Every institution, researcher, and archivist provides an entry point to this diverse debate, moving the community closer to a common understanding of how to tackle these challenges. Established standards and expected formats may not adequately address the increasing pace of change in digital content, so professional conversation is necessary.
TOPICS
The following topics within six broad themes are intended to help formulate ideas for submissions and are not intended to limit proposals for other topics:
TOOLS AND TOOL DEVELOPMENT FOR SUSTAINABLE INFRASTRUCTURE
- Strategies for maintaining Open Source tools
- Harvesting approaches and challenges
- Crawler behaviors for energy efficiency
- Optimizing indexing
- User-centric design / user-experience of tools
- Transferable workflows for social media archiving
- Deduplication of content
- Automated web archiving
- APIs in web archiving
- Sustaining tools via training, documentation, and knowledge transfer.
COLLECTION DEVELOPMENT AND CURATION
- Social media archiving (preserving the digital public discourse)
- News media archiving (democratic accountability and historical record)
- Using AI for curation with transparency and bias mitigation
- FAIR and CARE principles to ensure ethical and inclusive collections
- Prioritising underrepresented voices and marginalised communities
- Participatory web archives.
LONG-TERM STRATEGIES FOR ADDRESSING LEGAL AND ETHICAL ISSUES
- Data exchange
- Text and data mining
- Data protection and data security
- Privacy
- Freedom of expression
- European regulation on artificial intelligence
- Biases and representation, and inclusive data practices
- Public access to large collections as a human right and a public good
- Ethical frameworks for AI-assisted practices.
ACCESS AND RESEARCH USE
- Reproducible workflows for Collections as data
- Derived and statistical data for distant reading
- Guidelines and training for effective and equitable use of web archives
- Data enrichment for research use
- AI and the use of web archives for research
- Outreach and collaboration with the academic community
- Archiving research results and web corpora
- User-centric design of access infrastructures to support transparency and accessibility.
POLICIES AND STANDARDS FOR SUSTAINABLE WEB ARCHIVING
- Institutional embedding / sustainably supported web archiving programmes and tools (e.g. how short-term projects can become long-term initiatives)
- Long-term preservation policies (including format migrations and emulation strategies)
- Standards for long-term preservation
- Trustworthiness and provenance (ensuring authenticity, transparency, and accountability)
- Metadata standardisation for provenance and reuse.
ENVIRONMENTALLY RESPONSIBLE STRATEGIES
- Green web archiving and carbon footprint reduction
- Data lifecycle with sustainability in mind
- Reporting about metrics related to environmental impact (e.g. energy use, storage efficiency)
- Carbon-aware infrastructure planning for digital preservation and storage.
TIMELINE
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CFP open |
By 30 July 2025 |
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CFP closes |
15 October 2025 |
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Notifications issued |
1 December 2025 |
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Draft programme ready |
10 January 2026 |
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Registration opens |
21 January 2026 |
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Registration closes |
5 April 2026 |
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Pre-WAC workshops |
20 April 2026 |
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WAC |
21–22 April 2026 |
SUBMISSION GUIDELINES
All proposals must be written in English and submitted via ConfTool. In addition to the submission-specific requirements below, proposals should outline how their contribution advances the understanding of topics related to the conference theme, how it relates to previous work (if applicable), and what impact it may have on the conference attendees. All proposals should be accompanied by 3 to 5 keywords. The Program Committee welcomes and encourages submissions from first-time attendees and/or first-time presenters.
Within appropriate fields (author details and affiliations), please be sure to include:
- Name(s), contact details and organizational affiliation of the presentation author(s)
- Name(s) of presenters during the live session.
All proposals will be judged double-blind, so we ask that you do not include information about authors or affiliations within your abstract. Conference organizers reserve the right to remove these details from the main abstract if included.
The Program Committee may suggest an alternative presentation format to the one proposed by the submitter.
FORMATS
15-MINUTE PRESENTATIONS WITH 5-MINUTE Q&A
This format is well-suited for completed and extensive work.
- Must be submitted as an abstract of between 250 and 500 words.
- Must include 1 main topic, and 3-5 keywords.
60-MINUTE PANELS
Panels should include diverse viewpoints and facilitate critical engagement with a topic. Short presentations by the panelists are welcome, but the focus of the panel should be on the interaction among the panelists. Multiple panelists cannot be from the same institution.
- Must be submitted as an abstract of between 500 and 1000 words.
- If presentations are included, please provide short abstracts for each presentation.
- Please make sure to allocate a minimum of 30 minutes for the discussion.
- Must include:
- Title and panel description
- 1 main topic, and 3-5 keywords
- Name(s), contact details and organizational affiliation(s) of the panel proposer(s)
- Name(s) of panelists during the live session and the moderator
- Examples of the questions that the panelists will discuss
POSTERS WITH ACCOMPANYING 1-MINUTE LIGHTNING TALKS
An excellent format to spark curiosity and conversations during the poster session and breaks. Lightning talks are presented in a plenary session; posters are displayed throughout the conference.
- Must be submitted as an abstract of between 250 and 500 words.
- Must include 1 main topic, and 3-5 keywords.
5-MINUTE LIGHTNING TALKS
Well-suited for work-in-progress, specific use-cases, or experimental ideas.
- Must be submitted as an abstract of between 250 and 500 words.
- Must include 1 main topic, and 3-5 keywords.
90-MINUTE OR 3-HOUR WORKSHOPS
In addition to hands-on, discussion, or train-the-trainer workshops, this format can encompass various approaches, including Lean Coffee, Birds-of-a-Feather session, unconference, and brainstorming session. The submitter is expected to facilitate the desired format or have someone committed to doing so at the time of submission.
- Must be submitted as an abstract of between 500 and 1000 words.
- Must include information about coordinator(s), facilitator(s), format, target audience, anticipated number of participants, and technical requirements.
- Must include details about expected learning outcome(s).
- Must include 1 main topic, and 3-5 keywords.
90-MINUTE OR 3-HOUR TECHNICAL TUTORIALS
Technical tutorials should prioritize live demonstrations and hands-on exercises, including structured walkthroughs of tools or workflows, interactive coding or scripting sessions, problem-solving exercises, use-case simulations, and other formats that explore tools and workflows. Technical tutorials should clearly specify the required skill level, list any software or packages that participants need to install beforehand, provide details about the datasets used (if applicable) and outline any additional technical requirements.
The submitter is expected to facilitate the desired format or have someone committed to doing so at the time of submission.
- Must be submitted as an abstract of between 500 and 1000 words
- Must include information about coordinator(s), facilitator(s), format, target audience, anticipated number of participants, and technical requirements
- Must include details about expected learning outcome(s)
- Must include 1 main topic, and 3-5 keywords
Most workshops and tutorials will be scheduled on the pre-conference day, April 20; however, if space allows, some may be offered as an additional track during the conference (21-22 April).
To ensure a diverse and balanced programme, we encourage institutions to coordinate internally and prioritize submitting their most impactful proposals.
All submissions are due before October 15 (AoE / UTC-12) 2025.
The program committee will review all submissions and send out notifications of acceptance/rejection by 1 December. For questions, please send an email to events[at]netpreserve.org.