Call for Lightning Talks at STHC Annual Section Meeting

The Science, Technology, and Health Care Section is seeking members to present brief lightning talks during their Annual Section Meeting, May 26th from 2-3.30p EST. Lightening talks are brief, 5-10 minute presentations designed to share ideas, projects, initiatives, successes, and opportunities with the larger section membership.

Talks may also include calls for participation in research, surveys, partnerships, or introductions to tools or concepts you have found compelling in your work and feel inspired to share.

All Section Meetings are conducted virtually. Presenters are welcome – but not required – to create a brief deck of slides (less than 5) to accompany their talk. Presenters and attendees are not required to register for SAA to attend.

If you are interested, contact STHC Section Co-chair Allison Fischbach (afischbach@jhu.edu) by April 6.

New Issue: Journal of the South African Society of Archivists

Journal of the South African Society of Archivists Vol. 58 (2025)

Editorial Overview
Ngoako Marutha

The impact of archives and records management legislation on administrative transparency and accountability in Sierra Leone Public Archives
Umaru Bangura

Utilisation of Internet of Things technology for managing archives of public universities in South Africa
Zolile Myeko, Edward Dakora

Digital preservation of archival materials at selected university archives in Gauteng Province, South Africa
Lufuno Kgamedi, Isabel Schellnack-Kelly

Privatisation and displacement of armed struggle archives in Zimbabwe
Heather Ndlovu, Sindiso Bhebhe

Record-keeping on smallholder maize farmers’ welfare in Ruvuma region, Tanzania
Donata Kemirembe , Robert Eliakim Katikiro, Maliwaza Mbwana

End-to-end digitisation workflows with intelligent document processing for university theses and historical newspapers
Niklas Zimmer

Maintaining compliance with the Protection of Personal Information Act in Tshwane Healthcare Centres, South Africa
Isaac Mpho Mothiba

Archives and records management Fourth Industrial Revolution skills and competency requirements on the job adverts in Botswana
Olefhile Mosweu, Donald Rakemane

Enhancing recordkeeping in Tanzanian public universities through robust records disaster preparedness
George Firmin Kavishe, Francis Garaba

Managing the electronic records management system at the Workers’ Compensation Fund in Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania
Bertha Maturo

Implementation of a records classification system for proper recordkeeping in the Northwest Provincial Department of Community Safety and Transport Management, South Africa
Refilwe Mpho Malatji, Makutla Mojapelo

Application of the system development life cycle for the implementation of an electronic document and records management system in the public service of Namibia
Aune Iipumbu , Cathrine Nengomasha

CFP: Reimagining the Archive in the Post-Truth Era

“Reimagining the Archive in the Post-Truth Era: An International Interdisciplinary Conference” on 29 June–3 July 2026 at Eden Grove Complex, Rhodes University

Proposal Deadline (Second Call): 15 April 2026 

In an age of distortion and falsification, can the archive claim any mandate to speak the truth? 

With present-day global socio-political and technological developments, we are living in a time where expertise is undermined and the always-tenuous boundaries between “truth” and “fiction” are increasingly blurred. More than ever before, the archive has emerged as both a site of authority and a field of dispute. 

The “post-truth” era – characterised by the rise of misinformation, historical denialism, and digital echo chambers reinforced by social media algorithms – demands a fundamental rethinking of how archives are imagined, constructed, accessed, and interpreted. This conference invites historians, archivists, anthropologists, musicologists, artists, environmental scientists, natural scientists, information systems professionals, scholars and practitioners from a wide range of other disciplines, activists, and publishers, media practitioners and content creators to explore the evolving role of the archive in shaping collective memory, public trust, and historical knowledge in the post-truth era. What does it mean to “reimagine the archive” when truth itself is increasingly contested and under siege? How can archives resist manipulation, amplify marginalized voices, and act as tools for critical engagement in an age of epistemic crisis? Do they have a responsibility to extend their reach, actively sharing information rather than serving as ivory-tower repositories of research? We welcome papers and panels that engage with topics including but not limited to: 

  • The politicization and weaponization of historical records 
  • Archives and other repositories in the age of misinformation and conspiracy theories 
  • Forgery, authenticity, and the ethics of archival evidence
  •  Archives and genealogical fictions
  • The rise of “counter-archives” 
  • Digitization, AI, and the reconfiguration of archival authority 
  • Disinformation, deepfakes, and the future of historical and scientific truth 
  • Post-Colonial, decolonial and anticolonial archival methodologies 
  • Silences, absences, and erasures in traditional archives 
  • Archival justice and truth-telling in transitional societies 
  • Creative, speculative, and performative archival practices
  • The role of curation in archive building
  • Content management strategies for building spaces of truth
  • Policy design and legislative frameworks 
  • The role of archives in repatriation and social justice
  • Epistemologies, ontologies and taxonomies
  • The role of print media in the post-truth era
  • Rights, responsibilities and the ethical use of information in the era of big data
  • Self-curation, social media and algorithm generated archives.

We are especially interested in submissions that critically engage with interdisciplinary approaches, including digital humanities, media studies, cultural memory, fine and performing arts, public history, environmental and natural sciences, ecological challenges, and archival management and practice (including scientific archives and repositories such as herbaria).

Alternative presentation formats such as performative works, film screenings and/or the display of artefacts may be considered depending on the technical requirements and our ability to accommodate them within the programme and venue. 

It is envisaged that a selection of papers will be peer reviewed and submitted to an accredited peer reviewed journal for publication. Other peer reviewed publication possibilities are currently under consideration. 

Submission Guidelines

Please submit a 300-word abstract and a brief biography (100 to 150 words) by 15 April 2026 to archiveconference@ru.ac.za. Panel proposals (3 to 5 presenters) are welcome and should include a panel title, a short overview (250 to 300 words), and individual paper abstracts. Notifications of acceptance will be sent by 30 April 2026. For any queries, please contact the organiser, Prof Alan Kirkaldy, at  archiveconference@ru.ac.za. Updates and additional information will be available at the conference website once it is up and running. 

Costs

  • Professionals (for example, Full-time Academics in employment and Representatives of Organisations) R5000.00
  • Postgraduate/Postdoc Students and Unemployed R3500.00
  • Single Day Professionals R1000
  • Single Day Postgraduate/Postdoc Students and Unemployed R500.00
  • On-Campus Accommodation: 4 Nights Bed and Breakfast Accommodation @R700 per night R2100.00
  • Off-Campus Accommodation: Information will follow once the website is up and running. 
  • Transport – Shuttle from Gqeberha (Port Elizabeth) to Makhanda (Grahamstown) Single: R500.00 Return R1000.

Workshops

The first day of the conference will be devoted to a workshop dealing with the whole process of building a digital archive presented by Africa Media Online. Participation in this highly informative and useful workshop is included in the cost of registration for the conference.

National Festival of the Arts

The conference coincides with this annual Festival. Negotiations are currently in progress to secure cooperative agreements, including discounted or complementary tickets to selected productions. Further details will follow. 

Contact Information

Prof Emeritus Alan Kirkaldy, Rhodes University

Contact Email

a.kirkaldy@ru.ac.za

CFP: “What’s the Matter with Description? Form, Practice, and Material Culture” (April 2-3, 2027)

Call for Papers

University of Delaware’s 8th CMCS Conference in Material Culture

April 2-3, 2027

“What’s the Matter with Description? Form, Practice, and Material Culture”

Keynote Speaker

SUSAN STEWART

(Princeton University)

Long considered a distinctive concern for literary specialists, description in fact informs all the arts and humanities and, no doubt, the natural sciences as well. Any object of inquiry—from texts to paintings to other modes of representation or from raw materials to consumer goods or from stars to dark matter—requires some level of description. While description has been and remains a prominent element of reflective thought, its valence has fluctuated over time, with some thinkers finding description to be paralyzing or pedantic, extraneous, misleading, even deceptive, and generally unwelcome. Others, reflecting on description specifically in relation to material culture studies, theorized description as a kind of second substance through which we make sense of objects, “reality reconstituted,” as T.H. Breen put it, whereas Jules Prown thought that textual description was, inescapably, the thing itself. Such characterizations are all the more promising today for cross-disciplinary conversations as scholars from various fields extend their inquiries to material facets of their respective subjects and, at the same time, parallel attempts to engage material culture within any one specialty provide methodological bridges between disciplines since all such efforts inevitably rest upon a studied translation of matter into language.

The symposium, “What’s the Matter with Description,” welcomes submissions from all disciplines concerned with description and the way it interacts with material culture. Papers should offer new perspectives on questions regarding the powers and practices of description, including–perhaps especially–those times when we take descriptions for granted and let them stand unexamined. For instance, how does the description of an object inform and transform what can be grasped of it? Or, is there a uniquely material culture approach to description, one that takes material agency seriously and presumes an iterative relationship between describer and described? 

Topics may include (but are not limited to) to one or more of the following themes:

• Histories of Description

Ekphrasis, Realism, Mimesis, Ut Pictura Poesis and the Imitation of Nature, Word and Image, Drama and Performance, Speech v. Writing, etc.

• Missions of Description

Expeditions, Experiments, First Descriptive Encounters, Taxonomies and Classification, Collecting and Archiving, Laws and other Codes, Memorialization, Education

• Protocols of Description

The Camera Eye, Impressionistic Description, Thick Description, Processual Description, Translation, Rules, Textbooks, Witness and Meditation, Memory and Remembering

• Media of Description

Oral Traditions, Personal Records, Print, Visual Media, Diagrams, Schematics and Maps, Photography and Film, Audio Media, Data Visualization

• Ethics of Description

Observational Objectivity, Phenomenological and Hermeneutic Approaches, Colonial and Imperial Gaze, Reparative Description, Politics of Description

Please send abstracts of max. 300 words, with brief CV of no more than two pages, by July 15, 2026 to Martin Brückner (mcb@udel.edu) and Sandy Isenstadt (isnt@udel.edu). The conference takes place on April 2-3, 2027, at the University of Delaware and the Winterthur Museum, DE. 

Contact Information

Martin Brückner

Director of Winterthur Program in American Material Culture

University of Delaware

Newark, DE 19716

Contact Email

mcb@udel.edu

CFP: IASA–BAAC 2026 Joint Conference: Archives in Times of Peace and War

Archives in Times of Peace and War: Safeguarding Audiovisual Memory, Identity, and Authenticity

Audiovisual archives preserve the voices, images, and sounds that define our shared humanity—but these same records are among the first casualties when a crisis strikes. From the Baltic region to Ukraine and beyond, archives have become both witnesses and targets in conflicts that test the limits of cultural resilience, digital security, and professional ethics.

This joint conference of the International Association of Sound and Audiovisual Archives (IASA) and the Baltic Audiovisual Archival Council (BAAC) invites reflections on how we protect both people and collections before, during, and after conflict.

How do we prepare in peace for the realities of war? How do we preserve the authenticity of digital records in an era of AI-generated misinformation? And how do we ensure that the archives of vulnerable and marginalized communities—especially queer, feminist, and immigrant archives—are not erased when visibility becomes dangerous?

We invite proposals that explore theory, practice, and lived experience across the full spectrum of archival work: from technical preservation to ethical frameworks, from front-line documentation to digital forensics, from regional cooperation to global solidarity.

Conference Sub-Themes

Preparedness in Peace: Building Resilience Before Crisis

  • Integrating risk management and disaster planning into archival practice
  • Regional cooperation, mutual aid, and safe-haven networks
  • Training and simulation for emergency digitization and continuity of access

When War Comes: Protecting People, Collections, and Data

  • Evacuation vs. protection in place—decision frameworks under pressure
  • Staff safety, psychological resilience, and remote coordination
  • Encryption, offsite replication, and secure data handover

Targeted Community Memory: Queer, Feminist, Immigrant Archives Under Threat

  • Strategies for concealment, coded metadata, and distributed preservation
  • Community-based archives as resistance and survival
  • Ethics of visibility and consent under repressive regimes

The Archive as Witness

  • Audiovisual evidence in documenting war crimes and human-rights abuses
  • Chain of custody, verification, and legal admissibility of AV records
  • Preserving dignity and consent in survivor testimonies

Digital Authenticity in the Age of AI

  • Verification and chain of custody for audiovisual evidence
  • Deepfakes, metadata forensics, and watermarking
  • Building institutional capacity for trust and provenance validation

Technical Resilience and Preservation Refresh Strategies

  • Managing LTO transitions, file-format obsolescence, and checksum integrity
  • Balancing cloud, hybrid, and on-prem storage models under duress
  • Sustainable refresh cycles and energy-aware digital preservation planning

Reconstruction, Repatriation, and Healing

  • Restoring collections and infrastructure post-conflict
  • Reconnecting displaced archives and digital repatriation initiatives
  • The role of archives in reconciliation, justice, and cultural renewal

Learning from the Past, Planning for the Future

  • Lessons from conflict-zone archives worldwide
  • Updating archival standards and conventions for an era of uncertainty
  • Reimagining the ethics of stewardship in a volatile digital landscape

Transnational Collaboration and Shared Stewardship

  • Cross-border partnerships for digital preservation and capacity-building
  • Shared infrastructures for validation, metadata exchange, and redundancy
  • Diplomatic and legal frameworks for international cooperation in crisis
  • Collective advocacy for the protection of cultural heritage under threat

As a membership organization, IASA is open to all. We do ask participants to acknowledge and adhere to our code of conduct. We hope you’ll join us this year in Vilnius, to share your stories & lessons learned. 

Please submit your proposal in English, by completing the form below, before April 13th 2026.

Description of Formats

Peer-Reviewed Contributions

All contributions must report on novel efforts. We do appreciate an honest and investigative view on your process, learning from failures matters as much as, if not more than, celebrating success! While we welcome service providers to tell their story, we will prioritize presentations that include the story of an implementation from the patron’s perspective. Should you choose to participate from a distance, please kindly indicate so on the form. To support a collaborative conference atmosphere, we will prioritize a critical number of on-premises presentations.

Presentations

We invite two kinds of presentations:

  • Long presentations (60 mins. including Q&A) must be novel, reporting on previously unpublished work.
  • Short presentations (30 mins. including Q&A) focus on new challenges and work in progress. 

Panel sessions  

Proposals for thematic panels to be held during the main conference program. Panel proposals will be judged on the merits of the proposal and relevance for the expected audience. 

Please detail the subject and desired outcomes for the panel discussion as well as the proposed panelists in your proposal. The Program Committee may identify individual thematic papers and invite submitters to form a panel or invite panelists to join a thematic panel. We encourage and prioritize panel proposals and panelists that reflect our diversity, equity and inclusion commitment to broaden subject matter content.  A respectful debate panel structure on a theme or topic is also very much encouraged.

Posters

Posters are ideal for reporting on emerging issues and on works in progress. Your abstract should clearly describe the topic to be presented and states its unique contribution to the field. Posters should aim to improve knowledge, show new technical capabilities, or share solutions and experience in the field.

Workshops and Tutorials

We welcome proposals for workshops and/or tutorials that address the conference themes for IASA.

Workshops are intended to be hands-on and interactive, and proposers are free to decide how to structure and design them. Workshops usually involve the development of a skill, related to the topic covered in the workshop. While workshops involve more hands-on learning, they should also allow for discussion, interaction and debate on the topic of the class.

Tutorials should focus on a single topic and designate whether it aims at an introductory level or an expert level. Tutorials allow time for group discussion of content and debate on the themes and concepts covered in the class. Tutorials need not be hands-on. Proposers are free to decide how to structure them.

Process

The selection of presentations will be made by June 1st by the Programme Committee. The presenters will receive their notification via email after this selection. The Programme Committee reserves the right to propose to the candidates to present under the Conference or the Forum parts of the event and/or in a different format.

Please note: All presenters will be required to register before the early bird deadline.

Submission form.

CFP: Upgrade: Enhancing Library Services with Technology (Virtual – November 12th & 13th, 2026)

Submit your idea today for Upgrade 2026! Upgrade will be held virtually November 12-13 2026. Conference sessions can take one of several formats, and you are welcome to submit multiple proposals!

  • Lecture presentation: 45-minute presentation + 15 min Q&A
  • Panel Discussion: 2-4 presenters focused on one big topic and sharing their experience
  • Lightning talk: 5-8 minute mini presentation/demonstration 

Topics may include, but are not limited to:

  • OER
  • Artificial intelligence
  • Virtual reality
  • Cybersecurity and data privacy
  • Media labs and makerspaces
  • Social media
  • Media literacy
  • Podcasts
  • Digital collections
  • Equity, accessible and inclusive technology

Selected lecture and panel sessions will receive one complimentary conference registration. Selected lightning talk and roundtable presenters will receive a discounted conference rate. For more information, visit the conference website. 

CFP: FIAT/IFTA World Conference

FIAT/IFTA World Conference 2026
São Paolo, Brazil – October 6-9

Deadline: March 24, 2026

Screen Memories in Dialogue: Learning from Diversity Memórias Audiovisuais em Diálogo: Aprendendo com a Diversidade

Media archives operate today in an environment shaped by constant transformation. Technological change, evolving media ecosystems, shifting institutional frameworks and growing social expectations challenge how audiovisual memory is preserved, managed, accessed and understood. In this context, archives are not only repositories of content, but active spaces where knowledge, practices and perspectives meet.

Under the theme Screen Memories in Dialogue: Learning from Diversity, the FIAT/IFTA World Conference invites professionals, researchers and practitioners to reflect on audiovisual archives as spaces of exchange, collaboration and mutual learning. Dialogue is understood here as a working principle: between institutions and communities, between regions, between professional cultures, and between past experiences and future challenges.

Learning from diversity means recognising that valuable knowledge emerges from different contexts, scales and traditions of practice. Across the FIAT/IFTA community, archives operate under highly diverse institutional, technological and cultural conditions. These differences are not obstacles to be overcome, but sources of insight that can enrich global archival thinking, inspire adaptation and foster more resilient and inclusive practices.

The conference seeks to create a shared space where experiences from broadcasters, film archives, sound archives, community initiatives, research environments and hybrid institutions can be discussed on equal terms. By bringing together perspectives from Ibero-America and beyond, the conference encourages contributions that highlight situated practices, regional innovations and collaborative approaches, while engaging with broader questions relevant to the international audiovisual archival field.

Full Call for Papers

CFP: ThriveLib 2026 conference – Reimagining Library Culture

ThriveLib 2026 is now accepting proposals.

Our theme, Reimagining Library Culture (Together), is grounded in the belief that joy and sustainability cannot exist without safety, dignity, and care.

We are intentionally seeking proposals that center the experiences and voices of people from historically and currently underrepresented groups in librarianship, and that name how systems of oppression shape library work and well-being.

ThriveLib 2026 is taking place in a moment of widespread instability that is shaping the lives and work of many library workers. Some are carrying far greater risk, grief, and exhaustion than others. We invite proposals that acknowledge these realities and explore how library systems and expectations can either deepen harm or offer meaningful support.

We welcome proposals that:

·           Speak from lived experience

·           Name harm without requiring solutions

·           Explore collective, capacity-aware approaches to change

You do not need institutional backing, polished outcomes, or traditional credentials to submit.

Speaker honorariums and free registration are provided.

Proposals are due by 12:00 noon Central time on Friday April 10, 2026. CFP details and submission link: https://www.thrivelib.com/2026-cfpThe Contact email – ThriveLib@gmail.com

CFP: Children’s Tesmonies. Unveiling historical and art-historical archives

Conference at the University of Bonn/Center for Slavery and Dependency Studies (BCDSS) Oct 22nd -24th 2026

PDF of full CFP

Children around the world witness brutal violence: in wars, through displacement or migration, and increasingly also through climate disasters. At the same time, children worldwide are threatened by physical violence and experience it as emotional and psychological violence (distress). Children leave behind a wide range of testimonies of their experiences of violence, which are only belatedly becoming the focus of research and children are thus becoming increasingly important as witnesses to violence. This shift in the importance attached to children as witnesses affected by extreme violence has been aided by a revaluation of children as future adults. The planned conference aims to complement this contemporary observation with a historical dimension, bringing different approaches into dialogue with one another. Understanding children as witnesses inevitably raises methodological issues. These have been far less widely addressed in historical research than in law and psychology.[1] For this reason, the conference will be fullheartedly interdisciplinary and aims at visual, material, archeological and textual archives of childhood, trauma, and violence.

[1] fundamental: Gail S. Goodman, ‘Children’s Testimony in Historical Perspective’, Journal of Social Issues, 40.2 (1984), pp. 9–31; Yuille, John C.: THE SYSTEMATIC ASSESSMENT OF CHILDREN’S TESTIMONY. In: Canadian Psychology/Psychologie Canadienne, 1988, 29:3, S. 247-263.

Contact Information

The conference is held by Claudia Jarzebowski and Birgit U. Muench, both of the UNiversity of Bonn, at the University of Bonn’s Center for Slavery and Dependency Studies.

Contact Email: claudia.jarzebowski@uni-bonn.de

URL: https://www.dependency.uni-bonn.de/en/about-us/people/principal-investigators/claudia-jarzebowski

New Issue: South African Journal of Libraries and Information Science

Vol. 92 No. 1 (2026): Stewardship of Documentary Heritage in Lesotho: Reflections from the Basotho Bicentennial Conference
(open access)

Editorial
Stewardship of documentary heritage in Lesotho: reflections from the Basotho Bicentennial Conference

Research Articles
Preserving and indigenising chieftainship cultural heritage in Lesotho: the case of Royal Archives and Museum
Matseliso Moshoeshoe-Chadzingwa

Safeguarding Basotho heritage: the role of Lesotho National Library Srvices in the digital preservation of national collection
Wole Michael Olatokun, Mamoeletsi Cecilia Monyane

Preserving the past, present and future: the case of Lesotho National Broadcasting Services
Ts’epo Joseph Rafoneke

Cloud computing as a disaster management tool for documentary heritage management: reflections by the National University of Lesotho
Tahleho Tseole, Olefhile Mosweu

Preservation management framework in library and archival institutions: a conceptual framework
Thatayaone Segaetsho

Preserving language through digital neologisms: a study of word-formation processes in the digital age
Beatrice Ekanjume, Maboleba Kolobe, Thuso Leoisa

Language and translation as tools for the archiving and preservation of Indigenous knowledge: the case of Lesotho
Mosisili Sebotsa

A case for black sartorial history: the role of orality, archives, museums, and libraries
Khaya Mchunu, Maneo Ralebitso, Kiara Gounder

Generating knowledge for archives, libraries and museums: oral history research methodology in the twenty first century
Neo Lekgotla laga Ramoupi, Maneo Ralebitso

Orality as a mechanism of preserving SeMoshoeshoe Basotho History
Keneuoe Anacletta Motšoene

The complexities of shared digital curation: a case study relating to Lesotho material held in the Royal Commonwealth Society collection at Cambridge University Library
Sally Kent