Forum News

June 9, 2026

2026 Forum Sponsor Highlight: Bridwell Press

By Maggie Rosenau

This year we invited sponsors at the Sustainer Level and above to introduce themselves through narratives of how users engage with their platforms/products. Participants can connect with sponsors during and after the Forum through onsite tables, online sponsor channels in the Discord, and Chats with a Sponsor—a scheduled time for you to share and get feedback from sponsors about a publishing pain point you think they might be able to solve.

By Michelle Ried, Bridwell Press

Bridwell Library and Press logo

BRIDWELL PRESS: Where History and Culture Meet Creativity & Poetry

Founded in 2022, Bridwell Press grew out of the desire to develop a sustainable open-access press that supported global voices and approaches creatively, while continuing the legacy of the former SMU Press that closed in 2010. Early contributors included librarians dedicated to better writing pedagogy, a Brazilian jurist seeking novel approaches to religious understanding, and a progressive Jewish theologian laying the groundwork for mutual respect within interfaith dialogue in the Middle East. This was just the beginning.

What has followed is a journey not just of collaboration, but of community that believes in the truest natures of human goodness and the spirit of the creative mind. Through critical scholarship, advanced translation, and innovative verse, Bridwell Press has emerged as a cutting edge publisher of both contemporary research and poetry, and of thousand-year-old historical and literary works rendered into modern English.

Anthony Elia Welcome Video Still — Click image to watch Anthony Elia’s Welcome

Bridwell Press works with teams of scholars and translators from Dallas and Minneapolis to Rome and Hong Kong, and produces titles from Armenian and Spanish to medieval Japanese and Tatar. Our editorial boards are governed by editors from a diverse group of institutions like SMU, Macalester College, NYU, and Oxford University and provide the highest standards of review and production.

Some of the most important works in translation come out of zones of conflict or where historical and literary legacies are not well represented, including poetry and scholarship from Ukraine, literature from 1910s Armenia, Cambodian religious writings from the mid-20th century, 14th-century Mongolian poetic and historical writings, and even 8th-century literature from Japan. Seeking to reveal vastly underrepresented works and make them available open access is an honor that we can share with both students and the greater world of readers.

Here readers can view Bridwell Press Director Anthony Elia welcome folks to reach out to him to talk further about Bridwell’s lists and editorial processes, including their use of Fulcrum as an academy-owned publishing platform.

June 5, 2026

2026 Forum Sponsor Highlight: Quire

By Maggie Rosenau

By Erin Dunigan, Quire

Quire logo

Quire is a digital publishing tool developed and used by Getty since 2016. Quire is designed for longevity, discoverability, and scholarship. Using plain text files, Quire creates online and e-books as authoritative and enduring as print and as vibrant and feature-rich as the web—all without paying a fee or maintaining a complicated server. Quire has been open source since 2022, and a community of individuals, institutions, and museums worldwide uses it for free. In this blog post, we showcase a few examples of how digital scholarship/publishing staff and subject matter faculty members work with Quire to produce beautiful publications.

Shortly after starting in 2017 as a software engineer working in the Center for Digital Scholarship at Emory University, Yang Li became known as a digital matchmaker for faculty members working on digital projects. Faculty would come to Yang with an idea, and he would experiment to choose which platform would be the best way to bring their scholarship to life. After several years of research and experimentation, Yang chose three tools/platforms that he felt comfortable recommending: WordPress, Manifold, and Quire.

Yang saw Quire as an elegant way to surface valuable research that might otherwise remain inaccessible. Quire stood out for a few reasons, including the way it

outputs a static website that doesn’t require the headache of maintaining a server,
generates PDF and EPUB versions of the website,
enables deep customization, and
is actively maintained by Getty, including up-to-date documentation and training.

Yang recommends Quire to faculty whose work is image-heavy and best suited to a catalogue or monograph format, like the Michael C. Carlos Museum’s 2022 publication And I Must Scream. This exhibition catalogue features both an essay and a catalogue section. The object entry pages in this catalogue are automatically formatted by Quire to include a primary image on the left and artist information, essay, and comparative images on the right, much like a traditional print catalogue.

Quire has a notable learning curve, requiring navigation of the command line and writing content in Markdown and YAML, quickguide documentation for which is provided on the Quire website. Emory Art History Professor Amanda H. Hellman, together with Professor Annie McEwen and PhD Candidate Ellen Archie, were up for the challenge. Motivated by curiosity and a desire to learn, they did the bulk of the work utilizing Quire’s documentation and occasionally engaging with the user forum. When they brought the publication to Yang and asked what needed to be fixed, he was thrilled to say, “Nothing!”

More often, Yang is either directly working on a publication or connecting faculty with external help. He is currently assisting with the exhibition catalogue Making an Impression: The Art and Craft of Ancient Engraved Gemstones. Ruth Allen, PhD, Curator of Greek and Roman Art, wanted to include Reflectance Transformance Imaging (RTI). This allows the viewer to adjust the shadows and light as they move their mouse around an image. With some tinkering, Yang customized Ruth’s publication to include this feature, giving readers the opportunity to explore the luminosity of ancient carved gems in an elevated and unprecedented way.

Yang regularly hears from faculty members that they are pleased with the modern look and feel of their Quire publications, the way the tool structures content, and how it enhances the scholarship through its various multimodal features. After nearly a decade of helping faculty, Yang reflected that Quire is unique in that it “enables you to appreciate the beauty of the project itself; the platform doesn’t get in the way.”

[Quire Trailer]

June 4, 2026

Announcing 2026 Library Publishing Forum Scholarship Recipients

By Nancy Adams

The Library Publishing Coalition (LPC), IFLA Library Publishing Special Interest Group (SIG), and the Association of University Presses (AUPresses) are delighted to announce the recipients of this year’s Forum scholarships—the LPC Forum Scholarship, the IFLA International Scholarship, and the LPC/AUPresses Cross-Pollinator Award.

LPC Forum Scholarship Recipients

Bailey Lake, Eastern Kentucky University
Cláudia De Souza, University of Puerto Rico

IFLA International Scholarship Recipient

Sherine Eid, Biblioteca Alexandrina

The above awards help first-time participants attend the 2026 Library Publishing Forum. The Forum is an annual conference bringing together representatives from libraries engaged in (or considering) publishing initiatives to define and address major questions and challenges; to identify and document collaborative opportunities; and to strengthen and promote this community of practice. The Forum is being held June 17–18, 2026, in Seattle, Washington. The LPC Forum Scholarship and IFLA International Scholarship both offset travel and registration costs for first-time Forum attendees who bring new and diverse perspectives to the community. They are each assigned a mentor during the Forum and are offered opportunities to engage with the community after the Forum.

LPC/AUPresses Cross-Pollinator Award Recipients

Elizabeth Bedford, University of Washington [LPC member]
Sophia Hebert, Indiana University Press [AUPresses member]

The Cross-Pollinator award is a joint scholarship from the LPC and AUPresses providing free registration to a first-time attendee to each annual meeting: A member of an AUPresses institution receives free registration to attend the LPC Forum, and a member of an LPC institution receives free registration to the AUPresses Annual Meeting. AUPresses is the premier professional development and networking event for university press and nonprofit scholarly publishers. The AUPresses Annual Meeting runs June 13–15, 2026, co-located with the Forum in Seattle, Washington.

March 10, 2026

Registration open: 2026 Library Publishing Forum, UBPF summit, and Forum Friends

By Nancy Adams

Registration is now open for the 2026 Library Publishing Forum! This year’s Forum is an in-person event, to be held in June at the University of Washington, Seattle, Washington. We are excited to be co-locating our conference with the Association of University Presses Annual Meeting and to be collaborating on a university-based publishing-themed event between our two conferences. We are also happy to introduce a Forum Friends program for community members who can’t make it to Seattle in person! See below for details about all three. (more…)

February 13, 2026

Full COVID Policy for the 2026 Library Publishing Forum

By Nancy Adams

Goal

LPC’s goal for the 2026 Library Publishing Forum is to encourage the safest possible in-person conference environment through careful planning and mutual care.

Although public concern has waned, COVID-19 is still a serious health risk. Even otherwise healthy individuals are at risk for complications and for long COVID, and those risks increase with repeated infections. For individuals with weakened immune systems or other vulnerabilities, the risks are heightened significantly.

We acknowledge that an in-person event will inevitably carry a higher level of risk than a virtual one, and that even the most careful precautions may not reduce the risk enough for some community members to attend safely. For that and other reasons, we will continue to alternate in-person events with fully virtual ones. (more…)

January 26, 2026

A message about costs for this year’s Library Publishing Forum

By Nancy Adams

The 2026 Library Publishing Forum is still five months away (June 17–18, Seattle, Washington), and registration won’t open for a little while yet, but we wanted to help attendee planning with some information about expected costs. We are excited to have the opportunity to co-locate with the Association of University Presses Annual Meeting and to host a day of joint programming (June 16—announcement coming next week!), but the trade-off is that we will be in an already expensive city during a very busy time (Seattle is hosting some World Cup matches).

Hotel costs: We have a limited hotel block with rooms available June 15–17 at $389/night. Typically room costs are lower; however, the World Cup has greatly inflated prices during this time period. Some current estimates of hotel costs near the arena are as high as $1,300/night. If you haven’t already booked a hotel room and wish to book one at our hotel block, see additional details and contact information on the Forum website. Because costs are so high this year, we have also set up a spreadsheet (see Forum website) to help those who might wish to share a hotel room get in contact.

Registration costs: As we hinted in the report out from our last in-person Forum (2024 in Minneapolis), registration costs for this year will be slightly higher. Registration for our in-person conferences has always been a bargain and has never increased in our 10+ years of hosting, but hosting costs are much higher these days. We are still keeping registration relatively low (compared both to other conferences and to our per-attendee costs), with sponsorships expected to make up the difference. This year’s registration costs will be:

Standard: $400
LPC member discount (two per each member institution): $250
Low and middle income countries: $50
Students (limited number): $50

The bottom line: We understand that this year’s Forum will be a pretty significant investment, and we deeply appreciate the individuals and institutions who plan to join us in Seattle! For community members who aren’t able to attend—for financial or other reasons—stay tuned for opportunities to engage with the Forum from a distance. And don’t forget that we’re alternating in-person and virtual years, so 2027 will be another budget-friendly virtual conference!

December 18, 2025

LPC and AUPresses plan joint summit

By Nancy Adams

In cooperation with the University-Based Publishing Futures (UBPF) community, the Library Publishing Coalition (LPC) and Association of University Presses (AUPresses) are hosting a joint summit between the AUPresses Annual Meeting and the Library Publishing Forum. This event is titled “Responding to Universities in Crisis: A Summit for University-Based Publishing.” It’s open to attendees from both conferences, but we also welcome community members who want to come to just the Summit.

The Summit will take place from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. on June 16, 2026 on the University of Washington campus. Registration and other details will be available on the UBPF website by early February, as well as through the sponsoring organizations.

October 29, 2025

Call for applications for the 2026 Library Publishing Forum scholarships

By Nancy Adams

About the Forum scholarships

The Library Publishing Coalition is offering scholarships to offset travel costs for first-time Forum attendees from the United States and Canada, with a focus on individuals who will bring new and diverse perspectives to the community. There are two scholarships available, each of which will cover up to $2,500 USD in travel-related expenses, including airfare, hotel, and meals. Scholarship awardees will have Forum registration fees waived and will be paired with a community mentor to help introduce them to the conference and the community. For awardees from non-member institutions, the award includes guest access to the LPC community for the year following the in-person Forum. This would include access to the listserv and service opportunities, and the opportunity to participate in the peer mentorship program. All recipients will also receive a waived registration to the virtual Forum planned for May 2027. (If you live outside the US and Canada, and are interested in travelling to the Library Publishing Forum, you can visit the IFLA International Scholarship site.)

Eligibility

This round of the scholarship program will only be open to applicants from the United States and Canada.
Applications will be accepted from individuals at both Library Publishing Coalition member and non-member institutions.
Anyone who has not attended a previous in-person Library Publishing Forum is eligible to apply. (Anyone who has -only- attended the Library Publishing Forum virtually is encouraged to apply for this scholarship for travel funding to the 2026 in-person Forum.)
Applicants new to their librarianship career (first 3–5 years), new to the field of library publishing, and/or who identify as members of a group (or groups) underrepresented among library and publishing practitioners will be given preference. These groups include – but are not limited to – members of a racial/ethnic minority, first-generation college graduates, immigrants and refugees, persons with a disability, and LGBTQIA+ individuals.

Applications from people who could contribute to the diversity of perspectives at the Forum in other ways are also warmly welcomed.

How to apply for a scholarship

To apply for a scholarship, please fill out the application form. Applications are due by December 12, 2025.

UPDATE: The deadline for applications has been extended to January 5, 2026.

The Library Publishing Coalition’s Forum Scholarship Committee will review applications and notify applicants by Early February 2026.

Questions?

Email contact@librarypublishing.org.

About the Library Publishing Forum

The Library Publishing Forum is an annual conference bringing together representatives from libraries engaged in (or considering) publishing initiatives to define and address major questions and challenges; to identify and document collaborative opportunities; and to strengthen and promote this community of practice. The Forum includes representatives from a broad, international spectrum of academic library backgrounds, as well as groups that collaborate with libraries to publish scholarly works, including publishing vendors, university presses, and scholars. The Forum is sponsored by the Library Publishing Coalition, but you do not need to be a member of the LPC to attend.

October 29, 2025

2026 Library Publishing Forum Call for Proposals

By Nancy Adams

The Library Publishing Forum is an annual conference bringing together representatives from libraries engaged in or considering publishing initiatives to define and address major questions and challenges; to identify and document collaborative opportunities; and to strengthen and promote this community of practice. The Forum is sponsored by the Library Publishing Coalition, but you do not need to be a member of the LPC to attend.

The Library Publishing Coalition (LPC) is now accepting in-person and a limited number remote proposals for the 2026 Library Publishing Forum! We are thrilled to offer an in-person conference at the University of Washington in Seattle, WA, on June 17 and 18, 2026, with active remote engagement also planned. Proposals may address any topic of interest to the library publishing community. The proposal deadline is December 12, 2025. UPDATE: The deadline for submitting a proposal has been extended to January 5, 2026.

Proposal submissions are welcome from LPC members and nonmembers, including library employees, university press employees, scholars, students, and other scholarly communication and publishing professionals. Again, we welcome proposals from first-time presenters and representatives of small and emerging publishing programs.

The Library Publishing Coalition is pleased to announce that we will once again be offering scholarships to offset travel costs for first-time Forum attendees from the United States and Canada, with a focus on individuals who will bring new and diverse perspectives to the community. There will be two scholarships available, each of which will cover up to $2,500 in travel-related expenses and a Forum registration waiver. More information, including award details, application instructions, and application deadlines are available on the Library Publishing Forum Scholarships Webpage.

We are committed to expanding the diversity of perspectives we hear from at the Library Publishing Forum. Working towards some of the “Continuing Initiatives” from the LPC Roadmap for Anti-Racist Practice, we ask all proposals to explicitly address how they are inclusive of multiple perspectives, address DEI, or incorporate anti-racist and anti-oppressive approaches. Presentations about specific communities should include members of that community in their speaker list, and for sessions with multiple speakers, we seek to avoid demographically homogeneous panels. Everyone submitting a presentation will also have an opportunity to complete a brief, anonymous demographic survey so we can better understand who is submitting proposals to LPF.

Learn more and submit a proposal.

LPC Program Committee

Ryan Otto, Kansas State University (co-chair)
Jessica Thorlakson, University of Alberta (co-chair)
Elizabeth Bedford, University of Washington (host liaison)
Ginelle Baskin, Middle Tennessee State University
Stefanie Buck, Oregon State University
Christine Cata, University of Miami
Jennifer Coronado, Butler University (PALNI)
Annie Johnson, University of Delaware (Board liaison)
Cheryl Ball, Library Publishing Coalition
Melanie Schlosser, Library Publishing Coalition

October 17, 2025

Report on the Library Publishing Forum 2025 Demographic Survey

By Nancy Adams

The development and use of this survey were based on the recommendations found in the Library Publishing Coalition’s (LPC) Roadmap for Anti-Racist Practice. This is a charge carried out by the Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility (DEIA) Committee. The 2025 survey was administered to Library Publishing Forum (LPF) attendees to understand who attends the Forum. In addition, this survey helps us track demographic changes over time. (View the reports on the 2024, 2023, and 2022 surveys.)

The 2025 Forum was a virtual event held May 5-8, 2025. There were 316 registrations, slightly more than the last virtual Forum in 2023 (267). While we track attendance for each session, we didn’t track individual participation, so we don’t know the overall attendance rate for registrants. The opening keynote address attracted the highest attendance for a single session, 119 people.

Notes

As all questions were optional, not all questions were answered. Therefore, numbers/counts may not always add up. The respondent information includes both LPF attendees and presenters.

(more…)