Abstract
Abstract
Purpose.
The European conference on digital libraries, founded as ECDL in 1997 and renamed TPDL in 2011, held its 30th edition in 2026. We ask how its agenda, its community and the meaning of “digital library” changed, and what this implies for the field.
Methods.
We analyzed the 1,571 papers of the thirty editions, with their authors, affiliations, citations and references, and 3,608 papers of JCDL and ICADL. A large language model labeled every paper by topic, method, material and institutional setting, and the author coded a stratified sample to validate the topic labels.
Results.
Over thirty years the agenda of the series shifted from systems to data. Early papers built and connected digital library systems, whereas recent papers process scholarly and cultural records with knowledge graphs and machine learning. Authorship contracted toward Europe as authors from the United States declined. These shifts revise the concept of digital library, which no longer denotes a system but curated collections and the services built on them. From this concept we derive research directions, among them curated collections as trusted sources for artificial intelligence, the quality of knowledge graphs and long-term access, and directions for the series, such as an additional focus on the digital humanities, a visible place for practice and a wider reach beyond Europe.
Conclusion.
The field moved from building digital libraries to processing the scholarly and cultural record they hold. We propose that the series define a digital library by its role, the accountable curation of collections