6th Annual Medical Institutional Repositories in Libraries Symposium 2026 (MIRL 26)
November 19-20, 2026
Free virtual two-day event

The Medical Institutional Repositories in Libraries (MIRL) Symposium focuses on Institutional Repository (IR) management, curation, and promotion in a health sciences environment. MIRL is a platform-neutral conference. Our goal is to gather together IR practitioners and those with an interest in IRs at hospitals, academic medical centers, and other health settings for discussions and sharing of case studies and best practices for digital archiving of institutional content.

The 2026 Call for Proposals is now open! Submit your proposal here!

The Medical Institutional Repositories in Libraries (MIRL) planning committee is now accepting proposals for:

  • Lightning talks (approximately 10 minutes including Q&A)
  • Vendor talks (pre-recorded and available as recordings only)

    • The MIRL planning committee welcomes proposals on a variety of topics including, but not limited to:

  • Unusual medical/health sciences institutional repository (IR) content, collections, use cases, collaborations, or challenges
  • Policies and practices that ensure confidentiality (eg. PHI /personal health identifiers in IRs), accessibility, diversity, equity, and inclusion
  • Migrating repository platforms: stories, processes, and lessons learned
  • IRs in a time of budget cuts: ROI and justifying the cost
  • Finding your champions, marketing your IR
  • Reporting out: telling your IR story with statistics and metrics
  • IR harvesting and support tools, workflow
  • Strategies for management of faculty/researcher publications, conference posters, student collections, digital exhibits, digital archives, preprints, datasets
  • Promoting open access (OA) initiatives
  • Use of technologies (from APIs to AI)

    • Important Dates:

  • Deadline for submitting proposals: Friday, September 4, 2026
  • Acceptance emails will be sent no later than Monday, September 21, 2026
  • Registration is free for all attendees and will open later this summer.

    • Questions about the event can be directed to Steven Moore, Librarian at Sladen Library, Henry Ford Health.

    MIRL 2026 planning group members:

    • Lisa Buda, Rochester Regional Health
    • Jennifer Deal, Advocate Health - Midwest
    • Anthony Dellureficio, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center
    • Sara Hoover,George Washington University Libraries and Academic Innovation
    • Ramune Kubilius, Galter Health Sciences Library & Learning Center, Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine
    • Steven Moore, Sladen Library, Henry Ford Health
    • Pam Pierce, Oregon Health & Science University
    • Brittany Smith, Himmelfarb Health Sciences Library, George Washington University
    • Michael Upshall, Editor, Charleston Briefings