Report on WOLFcon 2026 (Prague, Czech Republic, 1–3 September 2026)

WOLFcon 2026 brought together members of the Open Library Foundation community, as well as other professionals involved in developing open-source technologies and infrastructures for libraries. The conference provided a platform for discussing the evolution of systems such as FOLIO and related applications, alongside broader issues concerning open infrastructures, artificial intelligence, metadata, collaborative collection management, and the long-term stewardship of scholarly resources.

Throughout the conference, the need for libraries to retain greater control over the technological infrastructures on which their activities increasingly depend was a recurring theme. In her opening address, Professor Ellen Euler situated this discussion within the broader concept of the knowledge commons. She identified three major threats to these commons:

Enclosure: resources or infrastructures that were previously shared become restricted.

Extraction: data and other resources generated by communities are appropriated by third parties.

Capture: the value produced collectively is ultimately controlled by a limited number of actors.

Artificial intelligence can exacerbate all of these phenomena. At the same time, however, measures intended to prevent large-scale extraction must not prevent legitimate users from accessing information. Therefore, the question of governance arises: libraries must establish mechanisms that protect common resources while ensuring they remain usable. Procurement policies were identified as a means by which libraries can demand greater transparency, interoperability, and control over vital infrastructure. However, the appropriate governance models for knowledge commons remain to be determined.

Several sessions examined the increasing use of artificial intelligence in library operations. The session “Beyond the Chatbot: Agentic AI and the Future of Library Workflows”, presented the SCOPE framework for evaluating potential AI applications. The framework’s five components — Suitable, Content, Oversight, Permissions, and Evaluation — provide a structured method for determining whether AI is appropriate for a particular workflow, and importantly, who remains responsible for the process and its supervision.

Technical presentations also explored the interaction between AI agents and library systems. The difference between APIs, which provide a defined entry point to information systems, and Model Context Protocol (MCP) layers, which enable AI agents to interact with APIs, was explained. Experiments conducted in the United States have tested the use of AI to transform MARC21 bibliographic data into BIBFRAME. This work contributes to the development of Blue Core, an open bibliographic data repository, the minimum viable product of which is expected in spring 2027. Other related initiatives include Index Data’s bibsync conversion tool and the Library of Congress’s Modern MARC project, which aims to bring MARC closer in line with RDA concepts. Nevertheless, these experiments demonstrate the considerable computational and token costs associated with large-scale, AI-assisted metadata transformation.

Another important conference theme was open bibliographic metadata. While the Swedish National Library has moved away from MARC for its catalogue and the LIBRIS national union catalogue, Stanford University currently operates in a hybrid MARC/BIBFRAME environment. Stanford is also participating in the Blue Core initiative. The discussions highlighted the uncertain copyright status of bibliographic metadata in the USA, primarily due to long-standing copy-cataloguing practices. In response, Stanford University has developed an Open Metadata Policy Toolkit and established a Center for Open Metadata. The conference presented a broader direction towards releasing bibliographic metadata under CC0 wherever possible. Following the presentation by Rochelle Lundy and Tom Cramer from Stanford University, the ISSN International Centre introduced its freemium model to the audience, explaining that it actively collaborates with DOAJ and Latindex by providing them with free access to its database, enabling them to reuse the metadata. Furthermore, the Directory of Open Access Scholarly Resources contains over 60,000 records which are also made available free of charge to the community.

Collaborative collections and rescue collecting

The ISSN International Centre took part in one of the main sessions at the conference, titled “Designing for Collective Agency: Shared Collections, Cyclops, and Consortial Action”, which was presented by Gaëlle Béquet (ISSN IC), Boaz Nadav Manes (Lehigh University), and Sebastian Hammer (IndexData). The session focused on the Collaborative Collections Lifecycle Project (CCLP) and its associated prototype, CYCLOPS.

The CCLP brings together around 80 representatives from libraries, consortia, publishers, aggregators, and service providers. The project aims to redefine collaboration throughout the library collections lifecycle, as well as developing the necessary governance, standards and software infrastructure to support coordinated decision-making. The ISSN International Centre contributed to the Cataloguing and Metadata Working Group of the project, which examined the descriptive, transactional, holdings and preservation metadata required for identifying and managing different categories of resources.

The Prague presentation used endangered Ukrainian scholarly journals as a concrete example of how authoritative metadata can support rescue collecting. Since 2014, and especially since Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022, Ukrainian universities and research institutions in occupied areas have either been displaced or reorganised. Some of the journals originally published by these institutions have subsequently been republished or re-registered by institutions operating under Russian occupation authorities. This may involve the reuse of titles and ISSNs, the replication of archives, the association of new identifiers with publications that claim continuity with Ukrainian predecessors, or changes to publisher and institutional information.

In these situations, ISSN metadata can provide valuable evidence. While an ISSN does not establish ownership or copyright, ISSN records document titles, publishers, places of publication, relationships between earlier and later titles, and related editions. They therefore provide a bibliographic chronology that can help to distinguish between competing claims concerning a journal’s identity and history. Ukrainian researchers have found this information useful for tracing displaced and appropriated publications.

The approach presented at WOLFcon combines local expertise with international bibliographic infrastructure. Ukrainian researchers and journal editors, along with the ISSN National Centre for Ukraine, use institutional records, registration information, journal websites, archived sites, PDFs, DOI metadata and ISSN records to identify potentially problematic publications. Any cases requiring clarification can then be reported to the ISSN International Centre, where relevant bibliographic records will be reviewed and, where necessary, corrected or supplemented with historical notes¬¬.

However, the central challenge is to move from identification to preservation. While the ISSN Network can establish what a journal is and document its bibliographic history, it is not an archive itself. CCLP provides a complementary framework through which libraries and consortia can collectively decide who should acquire, harvest, digitise or preserve endangered material. The proposed workflow runs from detection and bibliographic verification, through authoritative description and metadata sharing, to coordinated preservation by participating libraries.

CYCLOPS is intended to provide the middleware through which these collaborative intentions and decisions can be implemented. The broader CCLP approach emphasises optional and flexible cooperation, rather than requiring fully integrated consortial structures. Through CYCLOPS, institutions can share information about their collection intentions, coordinate acquisitions and preservation decisions, reduce unnecessary duplication, and optimise the use of distributed expertise and resources. The Ukrainian case study shows how such an infrastructure could respond quickly to scholarly and cultural heritage at risk due to geopolitical events.

WOLFcon 2026 therefore showcased an important convergence of developments currently impacting libraries, including the need to control critical digital infrastructures, the responsible integration of AI into professional workflows, the opening up of bibliographic metadata and the development of new collaborative stewardship mechanisms. CCLP and CYCLOPS are particularly relevant to the ISSN International Centre because they demonstrate how authoritative ISSN metadata can evolve from identification and discovery to providing an actionable signal that supports coordinated collection development and preservation.