LDCX is an annual unconference that brings together leading technologists in the libraries, archives and museums (LAM) spaces, to work collaboratively on common needs.

At the dawn of the American Revolution, Ben Franklin quipped that "we must hang together, or surely we will hang apart." At Stanford, we have consciously chosen to adopt community-based solutions rather than rolling our own whenever possible, and we believe our adoption of Fedora, Solr, Blacklight and Hydra (amongst other community based products and projects) have put us ahead of where we would otherwise be.

That said, we recognize the need for more: more shared components, more solutions from other sources, more contributors and contributions to the pieces we have already adopted. To help galvanize this suite of community-based solutions, we have created the LDCX series of technology conferences to come to community consensus on development, best-of-breed products, requirements and future directions.

LDCX 2018 continues in our tradition of bring together institutions and technologists with common needs and concerns to collaborate at the intersection of cultural heritage and technology. We hope to leverage this year's unconference not only to develop and improve shared products and solutions, but also as a space to identify areas for collaboration on the bleeding edge.

As in previous years, we also plan on hosting additional meetings around LDCX, including a Samvera Developers Congress, a Samvera Partners meeting, and the LOCKSS Alliance Meeting (all held March 29-30, 2018). 

High-level themes for this year’s unconference include artificial intelligence and machine learning applied to libraries, archives, and museums; data-forward architectures and APIs, ETL, data pipelining, and serverless system design; web archiving; distributed digital preservation; and modern front-end system integration, including convergence in GLAMs, and building an ecosystem of software developers around IIIF. Of course, as an unconference, participants bring their own expertise and topics--all are a fit!