2026-08-03: JCDL Receives Sponsorship from the NSF to Support Its Doctoral Consortium Workshop

In July 2026, Old Dominion University Research Foundation received an award from the National Science Foundation. The award, led by Dr. Jian Wu and Dr. Sampath Jayarathna, will support up to 5 U.S.-based doctoral students to attend the Doctoral Consortium (DC) of the ACM/IEEE-CS Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL) from 2026 to 2028. 

JCDL is the premier international conference focused on digital libraries and their associated organizational, practical, social, and technical issues. The Doctoral Consortium (DC) workshop, an integral part of the conference, is typically scheduled one day before the main conference.

In the DC, doctoral students in related disciplines — including but not limited to Computer Science, Information Science, Library Science, and Web Science — who are in the early stages of their dissertation work submit formal papers outlining the motivation, structure, research plans, and expected results of their dissertations for critical review. Accepted papers are presented at the workshop for questions and feedback. Doctoral students also attend the main conference to broaden their opportunities for intellectual engagement.

NSF previously funded the JCDL DC from 2013 to 2016 and again from 2023 to 2024. These funds supported more than 25 U.S.-based doctoral students in attending the DC workshop.

This DC Travel Award will prioritize students whose research agendas align closely with the topics outlined in the DCL "Leveraging Cyberinfrastructure for Research Data Management (RDM)," which is affiliated with the Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable Open Science (FAIROS) program and driven by the Public Access Initiative. In addition, the award includes support for several best paper awards at JCDL.

The 2026 JCDL DC will be co-located with the main JCDL conference in Dallas, Texas, United States. The DC is scheduled for October 13, 2026, one day before the main conference begins. Details on applying for the DC Travel Award are available at https://2026.jcdl.org/nsf-doctoral-consortium-travel-award/.

We would like to express our gratitude to NSF for its generous support of doctoral students in the JCDL community.

-- Jian Wu

P.S.:  WS-DL students have attended many of the JCDL DCs in the past, and their trip reports are available: 2023, 2020, 2018, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, and 2012,