About the Journal

Focus and Scope

The Journal of Critical Digital Librarianship is an open access and open peer review journal that publishes and builds community around cultural heritage digital library work. We focus on work that integrates feminist, anti-racist, postcolonial, queer, anti-ableist, and techno-critical frameworks. We are interested in critical approaches to topics such as:

  • Selection for digitization
  • Metadata remediation
  • Digital scholarship
  • Collections as data
  • Teaching with digital collections
  • Digital library technology

We are open to submissions from authors at any career stage, including those without institutional affiliation, and we welcome contributions regarding projects, communities, and technologies regardless of their language, size, or funding. In the past, we have published articles, interviews, podcasts, Tumblr blogs, and other scholarly and/or creative formats. We would be delighted to consider your relevant research, case studies, dialogues, reflections, and even accounts of failure. We invite you to share your work in whatever format - traditional or innovative - best suits your intellectual project. 

Mission & Values

Our mission as a publication is to pursue collective justice through scholarship that amplifies underrepresented voices, centers people over technologies, and critically examines power structures within digital librarianship. Digital libraries are collections of objects, documents, and artifacts purposefully curated within technological systems, and the content of those collections represents the labor, care, and flourishing of human beings. We focus on demonstrating the impact of digital libraries within cultural heritage institutions, while adopting a critical perspective on technology—examining its application, portrayal, and embedded structures. 

Amplifying Underrepresented Voices

We aim to publish scholarship that not only reflects the diversity of our field and the communities we serve but also critically examines the structures that have shaped digital librarianship and digital libraries. In doing so, we hope that our journal will support more inclusive and equitable practices in publishing as well as in our day-to-day work. We encourage contributors to intentionally cite a broad spectrum of scholarship, especially foundational works authored by individuals from communities whose voices have been historically overlooked, and to engage in ongoing reflection about how their citation choices shape academic visibility and authority. As part of our commitment to accessibility, we support research that addresses barriers in digital scholarship and prioritizes formats and methods that are broadly accessible to all, including those with disabilities. Our journal welcomes scholarship representing diverse global perspectives and emphasizes self-representation, especially work in which communities document and analyze their own experience and histories. We hope to contribute to a more just and representative future for digital librarianship.

Prioritizing Ethics in Technology

We are committed to advancing scholarship that explores applications of technology grounded in robust ethical frameworks that prioritize care for the earth and its diverse communities. We recognize that digital technologies often exploit the undervalued labor of information workers and perpetuate inequities in both representation and access. Digital cultural heritage collections nearly always contain materials representing racial violence, colonial oppression, and gender discrimination. We are concerned about the capacity for large-language models to learn from those representations without treating them with human empathy. At the same time, we understand that AI tools have the potential to improve the discoverability of digital collections by creating richer metadata. When used with an eye toward equity, AI tools could help information workers fill representational gaps. In our attempt to approach this rapidly changing facet of our work with transparency, we require authors to disclose any use of generative AI tools during the submission process. We aim to create an inclusive space that encourages ethical and equitable technology innovations in the field of digital libraries. 

Providing Open Access 

JCDL employs open access publication practices as part of its commitment to support equitable access to the global products of scholarship. While endorsing SPARC’s definition of Open Access as the “free, immediate, online availability of research articles combined with the rights to use these articles fully in the digital environment,” we are also committed to our values of equity in terms of rights and access. We support open access alongside a commitment to not push publication costs onto under-resourced scholars in our community, nor to require extractive sharing of community knowledge.

Peer Review Process

Because we believe critical approaches to digital librarianship require community-building among practitioners and scholars, JCDL operates under an open peer review model. The following summary describes the peer review process for JCDL, using the ANSI/NISO Standard Terminology for Peer Review:

  • Identity transparency: all identities visible
  • Reviewer interacts with: editor, other reviewers, authors
  • Review information published: reviewer identities (reviewer opt in)

Our open review process for relevant submissions is as follows:

  1. If editor(s) determine a submitted manuscript is in scope, they seek and assign 2-3 reviewers from the Review Team
  2. Editor sends email introducing author(s) and reviewers
  3. Reviewers use a form within Online Journal Systems to record feedback; form responses are shared with editor
  4. Based on reviewer feedback, the editor determines next steps for the manuscript and notifies the author; the author will receive notification of either acceptance, rejection, or an invitation to revise and resubmit
  5. If the author is invited to revise and resubmit, author(s) and reviewers have the option to meet virtually to discuss requested revisions
  6. If relevant, author submits a revised draft
  7. Commence second round of review (repeat steps 3-5); reviewers will evaluate whether recommended revisions were addressed.
  8. If relevant, author submits a final draft 
  9. Editor, in conversation with reviewers, makes final decision about inclusion in JCDL
  10. If manuscript is accepted, it moves to final copy editing and typesetting
  11. Article is published as soon as it is ready and is included in next issue of JCDL

This document was collaboratively written in 2025 by the JCDL Mission & Vision Task Group:

  • Sudha Anand, Indiana University Bloomington
  • Leah Duncan, Davidson College
  • Jeanine Finn, Claremont Colleges
  • Kay Slater, Oak Park Public Library
  • Paris Whalon, University of Tennessee Knoxville