CFP: Best Practices Exchange 2026

The Best Practices Exchange (BPE) Program Committee welcomes session proposals for the upcoming BPE unconference to be held May 18-20, 2026, in Indianapolis, IN, USA.

From the BPE website:

BPE is a community of practitioners in the area of the management and preservation of digital information who gather annually to share experiences and have honest conversations about our work. It is an unconference in the sense that we prioritize providing a safe space for active participation and peer-to-peer learning both in the sessions and outside of them. Speakers and attendees come from a variety of backgrounds, including government and university archivists, library and information science educators, technologists, special collection librarians, records managers, and product developers.

For BPE 2026, we are seeking proposals that explore how we maintain and evolve “best practices” in a rapidly changing world. Possible topics include—but are not limited to:

• The impacts of reduction in budgets and grant funding
  • How do we sustain digital work in a largely grant-funded world?
  • How do we advocate for funding to stakeholders? How do we justify the long-term funding commitment required to simply maintain and steward what we already have?
• Strategies for sustaining professional ethics in a shifting societal landscape
  • Navigating new laws and requirements (e.g. DEI changes, ADA Title II compliance)
  • Environmental impact of digital infrastructure
  • Keeping our professional ethics (i.e., ALA and SAA code of ethics) and judgement to align with changing technologies
  • Balancing our authentic selves and professional ethics while responding to emerging directives
• The positive and negative impacts of AI on digital preservation and access
  • Practical applications
  • Mitigating bias in AI algorithms
  • AI as an enhancement of human intelligence – supporting professional expertise rather than replacing it
  • Navigating the tension between user access and protecting infrastructure against AI bots
• How do we sustain the people who do this work?
  • Strategies for addressing burnout, retention, and workload balance

Proposals for a variety of session formats (including 45-minute presentations/panels, 20-minute presentations, 10-minute lightning talks, and workshops) should be submitted via the web form at https://forms.gle/KphBNMQcnsSYrL8E7 by Friday, November 21, 2025.