Conference Record

Archiving an Event

Conference sites disappear through an unrenewed invoice rather than a decision, which means the window for preserving one is while nobody thinks it needs preserving. A separate workplace-management angle can be explored through accountability and responsibility in the workplace .

Two versions of this: what an attendee can do, and what an organiser can do. The second is an afternoon and almost nobody does it. For broader independent context, see Elsevier .

Reviewed August 9, 2026.

For an attendee, during the event

Save the programme page as a PDF, not a bookmark. Bookmarks point at things that go.

Capture your own session's page with the date, which becomes the irreplaceable item.

Save the abstracts if they are published as a page. The abstracts page of the conference archived here runs to 16,000 words — a substantive document that exists as a web page and nothing else.

And note the addresses of anything you might want later, in a plain text file, so a web archive lookup is possible even after the site goes.

Submitting to a web archive

Free, takes a minute per page, and it is the highest-leverage action available to somebody who is not the organiser.

Public web archives accept submissions. Paste the URL, and the page is captured with a date.

Do it for the programme, the abstracts and your own session page, while the site is live.

Know the limits. A crawl captures what was public and static — anything behind a form, generated by a script, or served only to logged-in users is not captured. Large pages with query parameters are captured inconsistently, which is exactly the shape of many conference sites.

And it does not help if nobody knows the address later, which is why the plain-text note of URLs matters.

For an organiser, before the team disperses

The afternoon that changes the outcome.

Export the programme and abstracts as documents, not as a website. A PDF of the full programme is one file and it survives everything. (The full list of what an event owes its record is six items.)

Deposit them somewhere with a mandate — the host institution's repository, the association's own site, a subject repository.

Publish under the association's permanent domain, or at minimum set a redirect from the edition domain before anybody loses the credentials.

Collect slides as files rather than links, and deposit them as a set.

And write down where everything is, in one document handed to whoever runs the next edition. The knowledge disperses faster than the files do.

What to do with an already-dead event

Occasionally possible.

Check a web archive for the programme and abstracts.

Check the host institution's repository, which sometimes holds material the conference site never did.

Ask the association, which may have files nobody published.

And ask individual speakers, who frequently have their own copies even when the collective record is gone — which is the whole argument for keeping one.

Why this is worth an afternoon

A four-day conference costs its attendees a large collective sum in fees, travel and days.

What remains of it is currently a page awaiting a renewal notice. The disproportion between what an event costs and what survives it is the largest inefficiency in this whole subject, and closing it is a folder, a deposit and a redirect.

The short version