Dubai International Library and Publishing Summit 2026, November 16-17, Mohammed Bin Rashid Library, Dubai

The Mohammed Bin Rashid Library holds the third Dubai International Library and Publishing Summit on November 16 and 17, in its own building on the Dubai Creek waterfront. This year’s theme is “Architecture of Trust: AI and the Future of Knowledge Institutions.” Attendance is free with a registered pass.

Last year’s edition was about the future of the publishing industry in general. This one narrows to a single question that publishers, librarians and archivists are all now being asked by their boards: when text, images and citations can be generated and altered at scale, what makes a book, a catalogue record or an archive worth trusting? The organizers’ line is that trust has to be designed, and can’t be assumed.

Four tracks

The program is built around four themes.

Making knowledge covers how AI changes who produces work and how: research, writing, translation, editing and the question of who owns the result.

Trusting knowledge is about credibility. Provenance, peer review and editorial standards were built for a slower supply of content, and this track asks how they hold up.

Whose knowledge looks at which languages, histories and traditions are in the training data and which are missing, and who gets access to the systems built on them. For Arabic-language publishing that’s a practical issue, because systems trained mostly on English text tend to serve other languages less well in search, translation and discovery.

Keeping knowledge is the preservation track: what libraries and archives should keep when digital and synthetic material is effectively unlimited, and how to tell the two apart later.

Who goes and why

The summit draws from seven groups: libraries, publishing houses, universities, museums, research centers, AI companies and government bodies. That mix is the point. Licensing deals between publishers and AI developers are being made right now, mostly in private, and a room where both sides sit with librarians and archivists is rare.

The speaker list isn’t complete yet. Marek Kowalkiewicz is the one name confirmed on the summit site. The supreme committee is chaired by Ibrahim Al Hashmi, the organizing committee by Fatma Fikree and the scientific committee by Khadija Mohsin.

For an independent publisher, the useful sessions will be the ones on provenance and licensing. Those decide whether a backlist becomes training data on someone else’s terms or on yours.

Registration is on the summit site at dilps.mbrl.ae.