Call for Peer Reviewers: Humanities Methods in Librarianship #OpenAccess

Humanities Methods in Librarianship is a no-fee, open access journal that publishes high quality, peer-reviewed research with an emphasis on articles that push the boundaries — both thematically and formally — of what has been traditionally viewed as scholarship within the discipline. The journal aims to broaden the conversation by encouraging submissions that deploy methods from the humanities to address current or salient issues in the library profession. Humanistic methodological approaches may be used to address a wide range of topics within librarianship, so we encourage creative approaches and a diversity of submissions.

Are you interested in reviewing library papers relevant to your expertise in the following areas?

  • Archives
  • Art
  • Cultural studies
  • History
  • Literature
  • Philosophy
  • Politics
  • Religion

Please consider filling out this form. We would not expect to send peer reviewers more than one article per issue; at present, we expect to publish about one issue per year.

We hope that you will consider joining us! We look forward to hearing from you.

All the best,

The Humanities Methods in Librarianship editorial board

Feel free to direct any questions to editors@humanitiesmethods.org.

Call for Contributions to Notes from the Field: Fall 2025

Notes from the Field, a publication of the TPS Collective, is accepting submissions about teaching and working with primary sources for three series of peer-reviewed blog posts: “Art and Creative Making in Primary Source Instruction,” “Primary Source Kits,” and an Open Call.

These topics are drawn from subjects discussed at the 2025 TPS Fest and Conversations on the TPS Listserv. Grounded in issues your colleagues in the field are exploring, this call is intended to highlight a broad range of voices from all sectors of the TPS community. Please see the calls below for more information.

Art and Creative Making in Primary Source Instruction

Following up on a spectacular session at TPS fest, we want to hear about your experience with integrating art creative making in primary source instruction. Are your students making zines? Are they remixing or crafting creative, visual, or otherwise less conventional outputs than a written worksheet or assignment? For this series, we want to hear about it all. What works, what doesn’t work, or what you hope to explore in the future.

Primary Source Kits

For this series, we want to hear about your experiences with primary source kits, physical, digital, or hybrid. What were the logistics of making such a primary kit (e.g., audience, content, creator, etc.)? What have been the challenges and/or the successes? What are your hopes for the future of these kits? We look forward to hearing your answers to these questions and more to better understand the work being done by our colleagues with this tool for instruction and outreach.

An Open Call!

We are also accepting submissions on topics related to teaching and working with primary sources to be featured in peer-reviewed blog posts. While we ask that contributions fall into either our “Reflective Practice” or “Practical How-To” categories, this fall we are open to reviewing submissions from a range of contexts. Our hope is that this call for miscellaneous submissions will create opportunities for practitioners to submit work that may fall outside our recent thematic calls.

Contributions should be 1000-1200 words and are subject to Notes from the Field’s peer review process.

Posts will be published on a rolling basis beginning in October 2025. Full submission information is available in the Notes from the Field author and peer review guidelines.

Any questions, expressions of interest, or submissions can be sent to the Notes from the Field Lead Editor, Joe Lueck at lueckj@union.edu.

CFP: Ozarks Studies Association Annual Meeting

Call for Presentations

Ozarks Studies Association 6th Annual Meeting

April 3th, 2026

at

Springfield-Greene County Library

Springfield, Missouri

The Ozarks Studies Association (OSA) invites presentations, papers, and posters for its fifth annual meeting in Springfield, Missouri on April 3, 2026. Presentations from across the disciplines on broad array of issues related to any aspect of Ozarks life throughout Arkansas, Oklahoma, Missouri, and Kansas are invited. 

We invite proposals 

  • of complete panels (with or without a chair) or individual papers
  • by scholars, archivists, museum staff, independent scholars, and graduate students
  • in the fields of anthropology, archelogy, biology, environmental studies, engineering, geography, geology, history, literature, museum design, pedagogy, preservation, urban studies, zoology, etc.

To be considered, submit

  • an abstract 
  • a two-page CV
  • label it as paper or poster

To Dr. Jared Phillips at jmp006@uark.edu. 

All materials must be received by January 16th, 2026. Notifications will be made by February 6th, 2026. 

If you would be willing to chair a panel, submit a two-page CV Dr. Jared Phillips by March 6th, 2026.

All inquiries should be sent to Dr. Jared Phillips at jmp006@uark.edu. 

Contact Information

Jared Phillips,

Ozarks Studies Association President

University of Arkansas

Contact Email

jmp006@uark.edu

URL

https://www.ozarks-studies-assoc.com/about-6

New Issue: American Archivist

In issue 88.1 of American Archivist, Helen Wong Smith urges the profession to increase collaboration in her Presidential Address from the 2024 Annual Meeting; Megan K. Friedel offers pathways for archivists to apply reparative description practices to disability histories; and Alexandra Chassanoff, Eliscia Kinder, and Elliott Kuecker share experiences teaching MLIS students to use regional primary sources to construct digital history exhibits. Also in this issue, discover six excellent reviews on recent archives publications.

This issue also features a Special Section on Accessioning edited by Rosemary K. J. Davis, Audra Eagle Yun, and Rachel Searcy. The section contains five articles on a diverse range of topics, including a case study confronting the challenges of accessioning in a repository with limited resources, a case study detailing the process of starting a born-digital archival accessioning program and designing workflows scalable for a small institution, excerpts from the National Best Practices for Archival Accessioning Working Group’s Archival Accessioning Best Practices, and an introduction from the co-editors of this special section.

On the Cover: Accessioning-themed embroidery art created by guest editor Rachel Searcy. Based on the iconic “Mom Heart” tattoo motif from the American traditional tattoo style, the banner reads “Accession.” Leaves and flowers around the heart symbolize the growth of accessioning practice in recent years, and the bird represents its flight to new heights. Created by hand with needle and thread, this piece demonstrates the craft of accessioning and highlights the labor required to do accessioning work. Read this issue’s Special Section on Accessioning starting on page 10. Photo courtesy of Rachel Searcy.

American Archivist 88.1 (Spring/Summer 2025)
Table of Contents

(Review access here)

From the Editor

Presidential Address

From the Special Section Co-Editors

Special Section: Accessioning

Articles 

Reviews

CFP: Digitalisation and (Un)Sustainability: Assessing Digital Waste and Material Pollution in the City

CFP from Urban Planning, open access journal

About the Issue
Recent developments in AI technologies have exacerbated existing concerns about the (un)sustainability of digitalisation and datafication. These concerns are related to the limitations of resources both natural and infrastructure-wise (Dekeyser & Lynch, 2025), to the exhaustion of the latter provoked by the excessive AI-use (Wang & Yorke-Smith, 2025), digital archiving, and mundane data consumption (Vale et al., 2024). This is related to the glut of digital footprints and waste in cities, which has been a problem for both cities and the media for centuries, albeit supercharged in the contemporary moment. What is new is the excessive use and normalisation of an (un)sustainable relationship with digital technology, including the everyday use of tools such as Chat GPT (Hogan, 2024). These tools have severe carbon footprint impacts, using as much water as an average family uses in almost two years for server cooling and electricity generation. For every hundred words generated by the service, an average of three bottles of water are consumed (DeGeurin, 2023).

The smart city and the new digital twins’ tropes—along with prescriptive and acritical perspectives that technologies will be the panacea for any complex issue—are part of the problem (Chiappini, 2020). Discourses around the effectiveness of these types of initiatives and projects often create, semantically and semiotically (Babushkina & Votsis, 2022), a distorted view of digital solutions for fictitious issues, including distortions of key human traits such as knowledge, meaning, and embeddedness into reality. On a smaller scale, the everyday life consumption on search engines, direct messaging, social media addiction, multimedia file exchange, and purchases on big tech logistic platforms pollute not only the environment but the collective consciousness, producing confusion, exhaustion, and fatigue. This constant generation of an amount of information that pollutes the brain becomes what Lovink (2019) defined as “brain-junk.” The number of apps keeps increasing, and so does the data they collect, but users are not always aware and digitally literate about these risks. Hence, both co-dependency on media technologies and a lack of a high degree of digital literacy can be considered societal and spatial issues that might create unevenness. It is unfortunately not possible to control-click emptying the trash from digital waste and material pollution: much of it goes beyond the current understanding and technical capability to take care of. Therefore, there is an urge to overcome the rapid accelerationism of techno-determinism and solutionism and identify tactics and strategies aimed at reducing digital waste.

This thematic issue is concerned with the timely and vital problem of digitalisation and its (un)sustainability, fostering a discussion on the waste and pollution, digital and material, caused by massive datafication and urban platformisation (Cristofari, 2023). The relationship between the geographical scale, socio-political goals, and the technological design of digital infrastructures is of crucial importance to the understanding of the issue of digital waste and its possible reduction (Chiappini & Ferrari, 2024). For instance, data centres account for about two percent of all global energy use, and the raw amount of energy consumed by data centres doubles roughly every four to eight years (International Energy Agency, 2022). Hence, in terms of urban planning, the localisation of data centres has key implications, with direct consequences over the surrounding environment with regard to air pollution and climate change. The thematic issue encompasses inter- and trans-disciplinary perspectives from urban studies and planning, including digital geography, sociology, semiotics, environmental studies, and legal approaches. It aims to engage critically with the normative and prescriptive discourses which favour a techno-determinist view where smart city projects are celebrated. We invite papers that deal with concepts such as waste, noise, and excess in terms of data, materials, time, labour, cultural surplus, chatbots, and AI-powered services, also, but not exclusively, in relation to the uselessness and ineffectiveness of smart city projects and digital twins’ experiments.

References:

Instructions for Authors
Authors interested in submitting a paper for this issue are asked to consult the journal’s instructions for authors and submit their abstracts (maximum of 250 words, with a tentative title) through the abstracts system (here). When submitting their abstracts, authors are also asked to confirm that they are aware that Urban Planning is an open access journal with a publishing fee if the article is accepted for publication after peer-review (corresponding authors affiliated with our institutional members do not incur this fee).

Open Access
Readers across the globe will be able to access, share, and download this issue entirely for free. Corresponding authors affiliated with any of our institutional members (over 90 institutions worldwide) publish free of charge. Otherwise, an article processing fee will be charged to the authors to cover editorial costs. We defend that authors should not have to personally pay this fee and encourage them to check with their institutions if funds are available to cover open access publication costs. Further information about the journal’s open access charges can be found here.

Call for Applicants: SHARP News Bibliographers

Over the past three years, SHARP News has expanded its range of bibliographies beyond the Annual Bibliography, publishing bibliographies on special themes such as paper, accessibility, and queer studies; bibliographies dedicated to dissertations and theses; and location-specific bibliographies on South America, South Asia, and Africa.

We are currently seeking a team of two or more Bibliographers to serve a 3-year term with SHARP News (2026-2029). The individuals serving in this role will collaborate to prepare an annual monograph and edited collections bibliography, an annual dissertation and theses bibliography, and 1-2 special topics bibliographies each year. They will also invite and manage occasional special topics collaborators from the SHARP community and support the Social Outreach Editor in promoting bibliographies. Familiarity with Zotero and strong search skills within bibliographic databases are required for this role. Bibliographers should have strong reading skills in English and another language. 

Applicants may apply individually or as a team. Each applicant should submit a one-page letter of interest indicating their vision for the role, as well as a brief (no more than two-page) resume highlighting relevant experience. We encourage applications from early career researchers (ECRs) and especially welcome applications from BIPOC. Please note that all positions at SHARP News are volunteer roles, and do not offer remuneration.

Submissions are due by October 1, 2025 to news@sharpweb.org. Successful applicants will be notified about potential next steps by November 1st, 2025. The new Bibliographers will begin their term on January 1st, 2026. 

Please feel free to direct any questions to the Editor-in-Chief, Andie Silva, at news@sharpweb.org and our outgoing Bibliographer, Alex Wingate, at bibliographer@sharpweb.org.

For more information about what happens behind the scenes at SHARP News, watch our video from SHARP 2023: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7PMcmYS5l5s.

Call for Proposals: MAC/SOA Annual Meeting 2026

The Program Committee for the Midwest Archives Conference (MAC) and Society of Ohio Archivists (SOA) are seeking session proposals for the 2026 joint annual meeting. MAC and SOA will hold a joint 2026 Annual Meeting on May 14-16, 2026, at the Ohio Union, Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio. Founded in 1870 as the Ohio Agricultural and Mechanical College, THE Ohio State sits a few miles north of downtown Columbus. A city unto itself with an enrollment of over 65,000, Ohio State is known for its top ranked academic programs in engineering, agriculture, and business, its world class research endeavors, and, of course, football. For more information about the host and the conference, see the meeting website: https://www.midwestarchives.org/2026-annual-meeting 

From 2015 until 2023, Ohio’s tourism slogan was “Find it Here.” As a slogan, it raised the obvious question “find what here?”; but as an archives motto…well, to “Find it Here” is an archivist’s greatest hope for anyone exploring their collections. Join us as we explore the myriad ways in which archivists and memory workers make their collections accessible, discoverable, and usable.

The Program Committee encourages submissions from newer professionals, first-time presenters, and colleagues from non-academic institutions. A MAC or SOA membership is not required. Presenters may submit more than one proposal but may present only one session OR poster. We also encourage those from smaller shops to submit presentations for a focused SOA track. We want to hear from the solo archivists or from those with more limited institutional support! For a list of possible topics and details on the proposal process, please view the MAC/SOA 2026 Call for Proposals website.

To facilitate collaboration among those brainstorming session ideas, the Program Committee encourages use of the MAC Facebook page, SOA Facebook page,  and this spreadsheet for brainstorming session proposal ideas.

The deadline for submitting session proposals for the 2026 MAC / SOA Annual Meeting is October 17, 2025, at 5 pm CST. Use the Call for Proposals form to submit your proposal. There will NOT be an extension to the call, so make sure to get your proposals in by the deadline.

If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to reach out to Program Committee Co-Chairs Hayley Jackson (jackha01@luther.edu) and Adam Wanter (awanter@midpointelibrary.org).

CFP: Printing History – Seditious Printing

Call for Papers for Printing History Themed Issue: Seditious Printing

In respect of the 250th anniversary of the printing of the Declaration of Independence, Printing History 38 will examine print as a means of provocation, agitation, and rebellion. We invite author submissions that interrogate print-as-protest across borders and cultural contexts, with a focus on printing’s particular power to foment political and social change. We particularly welcome submissions highlighting the print production of underresearched and/or marginalized groups and individuals. 

We invite interested researchers, professionals, and practitioners to share work engaged with the following topics:

  • Print production as a means of political provocation and rebellion
  • Print and the shaping of American (or other cultural/political) imaginaries
  • Print as a catalyst for social change
  • Activist print cultures: posters, broadsides, zines, ephemera
  • Printed matter as an organizing tool
  • Secret presses; underground printing 
  • Interrogations of print and power

In general, Printing History follows the Chicago Manual of Style. An APHA style guide and further information for contributors can be downloaded here.

Submissions should be emailed to editor@printinghistory.org. If you have questions about this issue, the process, or the journal in general, do not hesitate to write. We do not solicit proposals for articles, but we are happy to discuss ideas and abstracts via email.

Submission deadline: October 31, 2025

CFP: Cold altitudes: knowledge, imagination, and experiences of mountain ice

Editor’s Note: I think this is the first time I’ve seen the phrase “ice as archive,” and I hope there is an archivist who is able to participate!

Call for conference papers

Cold altitudes: knowledge, imagination, and experiences of mountain ice

Date: 11-12.05.2026

Venue: University of Fribourg, Switzerland

Organisers: Christine Bichsel (University of Fribourg), Katja Doose (University Lyon 2)

From glaciological expeditions to snow myths, from avalanche laws to mountain poetics, ice has shaped how humans engage with high-altitude environments. This conference explores how societies have known, represented, and inhabited mountain ice—broadly understood to include glaciers, snowfields and avalanches —through empirical and conceptual lenses across the humanities and social sciences. Recent advances in the ice humanities and related fields explored the manifold relationships between humans and ice mainly focusing on examining polar and circumpolar contexts. A systematic account on mountain ice is missing in the social sciences and humanities. This conference seeks to examine human-ice relations as part of the cultural, political, ecological, spiritual and scientific dimensions of mountains. 

We invite contributions that investigate mountain ice as a medium of knowledge, cultural meaning, and social life. How have glaciers and snow been imagined in literature and art? How have they been measured, inhabited, feared, celebrated, or transformed into resources? What epistemologies, cosmologies, infrastructures, or legal regimes have crystallized around frozen heights? We particularly welcome papers that address: 

• Histories of mountain glaciology, avalanche science, and snow observation 

• Scientific, local, and indigenous knowledge practices related to mountain ice 

• The cultural imagination of glaciers, snow, and avalanches in literature, film, or visual arts 

• Ice as a legal, political, or territorial entity in mountain regions 

• Aesthetic, emotional, or sensorial engagements with mountain ice 

• Ice as archive: materiality, memory, and temporality in frozen mountainous environments 

While grounded in mountain regions, we also welcome conceptual reflections that connect mountain ice to broader discussions in environmental humanities, environmental history, historical geography, or science and technology studies.

We welcome submissions from junior and senior scholars. The format of the conference will be interactive. Conference papers will be pre-circulated, and participants’ commentaries will guide the discussions. We expect participants to submit their full draft conference papers by 01.05.2026. We aim to produce an edited volume from this conference.

Abstracts of up to 300 words, with an indication of the sources the research is based on, and a short biography (max. 100 words) should be sent by 31.10.2025 to christine.bichsel@unifr.ch AND katja.doose@univ-lyon2.fr. 

Accommodation and transport will be partially covered by the organisers, with priority given to financial support for junior scholars. 

Contact Information

Katja Doose

Université Lyon 2

Contact Email

katja.doose@univ-lyon2.fr

Call for Applications: 2026 Penn State Global Asias Summer Institute: Vitalizing Global Asias: Artifacts & Archives

2026 Penn State Global Asias Summer Institute

VITALIZING GLOBAL ASIAS: ARTIFACTS & ARCHIVES

Penn State University and the Global Asias Initiative invites applicants for its annual Global Asias Summer Institute, to be held June 8012, 2026. SI2026, co-directed by Neelima Jeychandran (VCUarts Qatar), Monica Merlin (VCUarts Qatar), and Tina Chen (Penn State), will focus on the topic of “Vitalizing Global Asias: Artifacts & Archives.”

Institute participants spend a week reading and thinking about the annual theme, as well as significant time workshopping their work in progress. Particularly strong work will be considered for publication in an upcoming special issue on “Things That Matter: Materiality and the Making of Global Asias” (13.2) of the award-winning journal, Verge: Studies in Global Asias (https://www.upress.umn.edu/journal-division/journals/verge-studies-in-gl…).

SI2026 will cover housing and some meals, and offer an honorarium to help defray travel costs (USD 450 from the East Coast, 650 from the Midwest, 850 from the West Coast; USD 1100 from Europe; USD 1500 from Asia and the Middle East). Applicants must have completed their PhDs no earlier than June 2021, or be advanced graduate students who are completing their dissertations.

On the theme:

In a time of hyper-mobility, heightened migration, and refugee flows, we seek to rethink the making of local, trans-local, and trans-oceanic Asias by tracing the lives and afterlives of artifacts and archives. Even as much attention is paid to studying people, places, and practices, we propose to examine the movement of artifacts and the archival actions of such objects to reimagine the proliferous and heterogeneous histories of the aqueous, littoral, terrestrial, and diffused diasporic geographies of Global Asias. By focusing on things and their materiality as sites where histories of travels, transfers, and transits are inscribed, we hope to generate conversations on other forms of archives that exist and how they can offer new epistemological meanings on Global Asian worldmaking. In assigning agency to things, we aim to animate the archival dimension of artifacts as they turn into layered documents, palimpsests of creative practices, and lived experiences that continue to enrich our understanding of cultures in motion. At the same time, we also treat the archive itself as a historical artifact that can bring to the fore unconventional records and collections that include ordinary items, portable objects, built environments, protection items, photographs, maps, artworks, and forms of mnemonic media.

This institute, then, invites participants to look at the afterlives of artifacts and archives to offer fresh perspectives on place-making and unmaking, mobile bodies, and embodiment in the

making of Global Asias. During SI2026, our collective work will be guided by the following questions: How does mapping the life of objects and the creative practices surrounding their conception rearrange existing knowledges and theorizations on the relations between the diasporic universes and networked spaces of sea and land? How does the making of an artifact and archive, and also the stories generated from their existence and extinction, reveal unknown histories of transoceanic communities, displaced and marginalized groups within Asia, and outside? How does the focus on materiality and contemporary works of art provide new insights into imperial geographies, spaces of containment, fragile places, and transit zones? We welcome a diverse group of scholars focusing on historical and contemporary research projects interested in the study of material cultures and alternative archives who are reconfiguring places, practices, networks, and alliances—both old and new—within Asia and beyond.

Application Process:

To apply, please send the following documents to gai@psu.edu by November 3, 2025. Items #1-3 must be sent as a single PDF file; the recommendation letter for applications from advanced graduate students may be sent separately.

1. An abstract of 1000 words outlining research project and clarifying its

connection to the Institute theme.

2. A sample of current work.

3. A current c.v. (no longer than 2 pp).

4. A letter from a principal advisor about the advanced status of work (in the

case of graduate students).

Decisions will be made by early December 2025 so that international participants will have time to secure visas. Inquiries regarding the Summer Institute may be directed to GAI director Tina Chen (tina.chen@psu.edu).

Contact Email

gai@psu.edu

URL https://sites.psu.edu/vergeglobalasias/2025/09/01/2026-summer-institute/