CALL FOR PAPERS

 

The Digital Libraries for Musicology (DLfM) conference presents a venue specifically for those working on, and with, Digital Library systems and content in the domain of music and musicology. DLfM welcomes contributions related to any aspect of digital libraries and musicology, including topics related to musical archiving and retrieval, cataloguing and classification, musical databases, special collections, music encodings and representations, computational musicology, or the application of music  information retrieval (MIR) to musicology (see TOPICS, below). 

DLfM alternately partners with the IAML and ISMIR conferences to encourage new collaborations and discussions surrounding prominent issues in our shared field. This installment of DLfM follows previous successful conferences in Seoul, Stellenbosch, Milan, Prague, Montreal, The Hague, Paris, Shanghai, New York, Knoxville, and London.

This year DLfM will be a satellite event of the IAML conference, and given that music libraries and archives are a regular first-contact point between researchers and materials, we particularly encourage papers and posters that use library and archives technologies and conceptualizations to broaden and enhance access to digital musicology methodologies. Scores and music documents have been digitized by libraries and archives worldwide for preservation and access, which numerous specialist technologies have been developed for use in their analysis. At this year’s conference, we aim to stimulate discussions around increasing usage of research tools within cultural heritage preservation and analysis, and resulting implications therefrom. We especially welcome papers focused on the “for Musicology” aspect of DLfM, considering how methodologies and results therein are made accessible for musicologists. Please note that DLfM’s review process for submissions to proceedings operates on full and short papers, not on abstracts. See ‘Submissions’ below for further details on format.

 

DLfM CHALLENGE

 

To complement the main proceedings, the DLfM Challenge welcomes short submissions introducing works-in-progress and position papers that will benefit from the broad expertise of the DLfM community. We welcome speculative work and submissions that explore particular problems, as well as those that suggest solutions, whether they emanate from practical, theoretical/philosophical, or other conceptual frameworks.

Given Greece’s acclaimed fundamentality to Western culture and modes of thinking, this year’s challenge track draws inspiration from the Socratic method of questioning as basis for research, preservation, and teaching in the interdisciplinary contexts represented by the DLfM and IAML communities. We thus seek challenge track proposals engaging a variety of questions—both with and about digital libraries’ content, infrastructure, tools, and engagement.

 

IMPORTANT DATES

 

All deadlines are at 23:59 Anywhere on Earth. There will be no extensions to submission deadlines.

• Submissions open via CMT: December 2025
• Full paper and short paper submission deadline: 23 January 2026
• Notification of full and short paper acceptance: 09 March 2026
• Camera-ready submission deadline for full and short papers*: 09 April 2026
• DLfM Challenge submission deadline: 15 April 2026
• Poster submission deadline: 15 April 2026
• Conference registration deadline: 25 June 2026
• Conference: 02 July 2026, Thessaloniki, Greece

* At least one author of accepted submissions must be registered for the conference before the camera-ready submission deadline to be included in the conference programme. Registration details will be announced on the conference website in December 2025.

 

CONFERENCE OBJECTIVES

 

• to act as a forum for reporting, presenting, evaluating and disseminating work combining technology with musicology through Digital Library systems;
• to critically evaluate the operation of Music Digital Libraries and the applications and findings that flow from them;
• to re-evaluate existing Music Digital Libraries, particularly in light of the transformative methods and applications emerging from musicology, large collections of both audio and music-related data, ‘big data’ methods, and MIR;
• to explore how digital libraries and digital musicology can combine to offer richer online access to online music collections;
• to set the agenda for work in the field to address these new challenges and opportunities.

 

TOPICS

 

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

 

Building and managing digital music collections

• Optical music recognition
• Information literacies for Music Digital Libraries
• Data quality assessment

Access, interfaces, and ergonomics

• Interfaces and access mechanisms for digital music content
• Identification/location of music (in all forms) in generic Digital Libraries
• Techniques for locating and accessing music in very large Digital Libraries (e.g. HathiTrust, Internet Archive)
• Mechanisms for combining multi-form music content within and between Digital Libraries and other digital resources
• User information needs and behaviour for Music Digital Libraries

Musicological knowledge

• Music data representations, including manuscripts/scores and audio
• Applied MIR techniques for digital music content or analysis
• Computational and systematic approaches to musicological analysis
• Extraction of musical concepts from symbolic notation and/or audio data
• Metadata and metadata schemas for music
• Application of Linked Data and Semantic Web techniques to Music Digital Library content, access, or organisation
• Ontologies and categorisation of musics and music artefacts
• Digital workflows (and their accessibility) for musicological research

Improving data for musicology

• Musical corpus-building at scale
• Enriching public access to music, music-cultural, and music-ephemera material online
• Digital Libraries showcasing need or support of musicology and/or other scholarly domain
• Digital Libraries combining resources for musicology (e.g. combining audio, scores, bibliographic, geographic, ethnomusicology, performance, etc.)

PROCEEDINGS

Authors are encouraged to consult and reference previous DLfM proceedings of full and short papers, which are available as Open Access publications in the ACM Digital Library as part of ICPS; and via the DLfM website. We expect to confirm arrangements for 2026 main proceedings soon. Posters and Challenge papers will be published separately on the DLfM website. 

SUBMISSIONS

All submissions must present novel work which has not been published elsewhere, and is not under active consideration by another conference or journal. Submissions must be anonymised as far as practically possible, and pre-prints must not be publicly available during review.

All submissions will be peer-reviewed. Full and short papers will be double-blind peer-reviewed by at least 3 members of the programme committee.

DLfM expects all accepted submissions to be presented in-person at the conference.

All submissions must be in English, formatted according to the ACM ‘sigconf’ template for two-column papers (see FORMATTING below), in PDF format, and A4 size. Page limits for submitted papers apply to all text, excluding the bibliography (i.e., references can be included on pages over the specified limits).

Submissions should be uploaded to the conference CMT website according to the IMPORTANT DATES above. The conference CMT website will open for submissions in December 2025. Authors should select the correct category for their submission as follows:

• FULL PAPERS of up to 8 pages excluding references should report substantive and completed research. Accepted full papers will be included in the main proceedings.
• SHORT PAPERS of up to 4 pages excluding references might report research which, while substantive, may not yet be complete. Academically thorough position papers are also suitable for submission as a short paper. Accepted short paper will be included in the main proceedings.
• CHALLENGE PAPERS of up to 2 pages excluding references should meet the call for the DLfM CHALLENGE section, above. Accepted Challenge papers will be presented at the conference either as a lightning talk, part of a panel, or as a poster (as determined by the Programme Chair). Challenge submissions will be published on the conference website.
• POSTERS should initially be submitted as an abstract outlining both the scholarly content and the proposed layout in 500 words, or fewer. Following acceptance, a digital copy of the poster itself must be submitted prior to the conference, which will be published on the DLfM website. Information on printed poster size and formats will be provided following acceptance.

FORMATTING

 

Authors should follow ACM instructions for formatting carefully. Authors submitting to all categories must use either the LaTeX or Word templates provided by ACM. Where possible, we recommend LaTeX (including Overleaf) due to a simpler process for accepted authors when producing camera-ready versions.

Authors using the ACM LaTeX template should select 'sigconf', 'authordraft', and 'anonymous' settings for initial submission after downloading the template from: https://portalparts.acm.org/hippo/latex_templates/acmart-primary.zip

Overleaf is an online web-based editor for LaTeX, with presets for  the ACM template. Authors should select 'sigconf', 'authordraft', and 'anonymous' settings for initial submission before accessing: https://www.overleaf.com/latex/templates/association-for-computing-machinery-acm-sig-proceedings-template/bmvfhcdnxfty

Authors wishing to use the ACM Word template should download it from : https://www.acm.org/binaries/content/assets/publications/word_style/interim-template-style/interim-layout.docx

 

USE OF GENERATIVE AI IN SUBMISSIONS

We recognize that authors of academic works use a variety of tools in the research on which they report, and to prepare the report itself, ranging from simple to very sophisticated. Community opinion on the appropriateness of such tools may be varied and evolving; AI powered language tools have in particular led to significant debate. We note that tools may generate useful and helpful results, but also errors or misleading results; therefore, knowing which tools were used, and how, is relevant to evaluating and interpreting academic works.

In the view of this, we:

1. require authors to report in their work any significant use of sophisticated tools, such as instruments and software; we now include in particular text-to-text generative AI among those tools that should be reported consistent with subject standards for methodology;
2. remind all colleagues that by signing their name as an author of a contribution, they each individually take full responsibility for all its contents, irrespective of how the contents were generated. If generative AI language tools generate inappropriate language,plagiarized content, errors, mistakes, incorrect references, or misleading content, and that output is included in academic works, it is the responsibility of the author(s);
3. stipulate that generative AI language tools should not be listed as an author; instead authors should refer to the first point;
4. run AI detection tools on all submissions in order to ensure accurate labour attribution.

This statement mirrors the Music Encoding Conference 2026’s policy, itself adapted from the arXiv policy for authors’ use of generative AI language tools. We reserve the right to amend this statement as discussions continue and evolve.

DLfM reserves the right to implement sanctions on authors should generative AI be misused or found to be in breach of research ethics, up to and including a ban on future submissions.