From December 16th to 20th, the 31st Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL), hosted by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), was held in Hong Kong, China. The paper titled Exploring the Action Path of Data Practices in Research Context: An Activity Theory Perspective, authored by Cuiyu Qin, a doctoral student in Publishing Studies under the guidance of Professor Xiaoguang Wang, and co-authored by postdoctoral researcher Qingyu Duan, won the Best Short Paper Award at the conference.

The award-winning paper explores the elements of scientific data practices and their constituting subsystems of production, communication, collaboration, and sharing based on activity theory. It analyzes the three levels of behavior that become increasingly concrete from “activity-action-operation”, and deciphers the action paths of these subsystems, providing theoretical support for empirical explorations of data behaviors and practices within the context of scientific research.

JCDL is one of the oldest, most scholarly, and impacting top international conferences in the field of digital libraries, jointly organized by ACM and IEEE. It is considered one of the three major international academic conferences in the global digital library research domain, alongside the European Conference on Digital Libraries (ECDL) and the International Conference on Asia-Pacific Digital Libraries (ICADL).

JCDL 2024 featured 15 sessions, 3 panels, 3 workshops, 2 doctoral consortia, and 2 poster sessions. A total of 192 papers were submitted by authors from 28 countries, with 30 long papers and 26 short papers accepted (acceptance rate of 29.2%).