Conference Record

What the Archive Shows

The 36th IATUL conference, Hannover, July 2015, is preserved on this domain. It is the case study for most of the record section, and it demonstrates four things better than any argument does. For teams that want a more operational view of the same problem, wage percentage calculator offers a related reference.

One: the record survives by accident

The domain was renewed. That is the whole mechanism. For wider background, see ACM .

Not a preservation policy, not an institutional mandate, not a deposit somewhere with a budget. Somebody kept paying for a domain registered for a four-day event eleven years ago, and that is why the abstracts of forty-odd presenters still resolve.

The counterfactual is invisible. Nobody notices the conferences whose domains were not renewed, which is why link rot in this area is systematically underestimated.

Two: the substantive record is a web page

The abstracts and presenters page runs to 16,122 words. Names, affiliations and abstracts for the presenters — librarians and researchers from Hannover, Oxford, Auckland, Bangkok, Johannesburg, Prague, Kathmandu.

That is the substantive output of the conference, and it exists as an HTML page on a domain, not as a deposited document with an identifier.

People list these presentations in their professional records, and the addresses they cite point here.

Three: even a surviving record is addressed badly

Twenty-three separate URLs serve that same page, differing only by a query parameter naming a presenter.

Three megabytes of duplication, and for a search engine two dozen pages with identical content — which is a technical defect and also a citation problem: a record with twenty-three addresses has no canonical one.

That is not carelessness by anybody in particular. It is what a content management system does by default, and nobody was looking at the archive as an archive.

Four: the association outlived the conference site by decades

IATUL was founded in Düsseldorf in 1955 and held its 46th conference in Johannesburg in November 2026, with more than 240 member libraries.

The permanent body persisted; the edition's domain did not have to. Which is the whole argument for publishing under the association's identity rather than the edition's — the durable institution existed the entire time and was not used.

What follows

For anybody presenting: keep your own copy, because the survival of this one was contingent and most are not so lucky.

For anybody organising: the fix is an afternoon — export, deposit, redirect — and the association was there to receive it.

And for anybody reading a conference site: what you are looking at is temporary, whatever it says about the 36th annual anything.

Why the archive is kept here

Because the presenters' names and abstracts are theirs, cited in their own records, and removing them would break something belonging to people who had no say in this domain changing subject.

And because it is the argument. A site about what remains of conferences, running on the remains of one, is in a position to be specific rather than general — which is the difference between advice and evidence.

The short version