Digital Preservation Awards 2016

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Digital Preservation Awards
Digital Preservation Awards 2016

Watch the ceremony

Watch the Digital Preservation Awards ceremony, filmed live on 30th November 2016 at the Wellcome Collection, London.

Meet the Winners

NCDD and NDE, ‘Constructing a network of nationwide facilities together.’

2016 Winner of the Software Sustainability Institute (SSI) Award for Research and Innovation,
presented by Neil Chue Hong, SSI and Dave Tarrant, ODI

To achieve cross-domain collaboration and to create a network of nationwide facilities, a practical framework has been developed in The Netherlands for public organisations that ensure sustained access to digital information. Based on realistic and achievable scenarios, these organisations and their clients can now make well-founded policy choices, rearrange resources, and better designate responsibilities on a national scale. Carefully avoiding a one-size-fits-all approach, the strategy is based on differentiation between do-mains while achieving economies of scale and other efficiencies by sharing jointly facilities and ser-vices where possible.

Watch interview with Joost van der Nat and Barbara Sierman

The National Archives and The Scottish Council on Archives: ‘Transforming Archives/Opening Up Scotland’s Archives.’

2016 Winner of the NCDD Award for Teaching and Communications,
presented by Marcel Ras, NCDD and Margriet van Gorsel, Dutch National Archives

These HLF-supported programmes jointly offer 55 practical year-long traineeships (of which 37 fall into the qualifying period), hosted at 26 archives across England and Scotland 2014-17. Our aim is to transform the archives workforce, bringing people with specialist skills (including strong IT qualifications and experience) into the heritage sector and offering alternative pathways to careers in archives. Trainees focus on a variety of skills but many take a bespoke ‘Introduction to Digitisation and Digital Preservation’ module at University of Dundee, to ensure our new workforce starts out with awareness of the critical importance of the emerging digital challenges in archives.

Watch interview with Audrey Wilson, Emma Stagg and Victoria Brown

Anthea Seles, University College London and ‘The Transferability of Trusted Digital Repository Standards to an East African context.

2016 Winner of the DPC Award for the Most Distinguished Student Work in Digital Preservation,
presented by Daniela Duca, Jisc and Steve Daly, BBC

Digital preservation is a topic that has been extensively explored over the last thirty years in the fields of archival and information studies. However, relatively little literature has touched on the topic of Trusted Digital Repositories (TDRs). A TDR is '[A]n archive, consisting of an organization of people and systems that has accepted the responsibility to preserve information and make it available for a Designated Community.’1 Standards governing TDRs, namely the Open Archival Information System (OAIS) and Repository Audit and Certification (RAC), have been designed and tested by developed nations with minimal reference to the developing world. Little attempt has been made to question whether these standards, entirely developed in one context, are actually transferable or applicable to another. There is an assumption, however, that because these standards have been generalised, they are ubiquitous and robust, transferable to any locale. This thesis seeks to question the basic assumptions that are made when standards or best practice created in the developed world are applied to different contexts outside of the original milieu of elaboration. Further, this thesis considers the applicability of TDRs to the Eastern African archival context.
Using threefold mimesis, the study examines the standards development process, identifying underlying socio-economic, cultural, infrastructural, educational and other presumptions that may exist in the documented standards. It also examines whether these biases impact on the applicability and transferability of standards to Eastern Africa.

Watch interview with Anthea Seles

HSBC, ‘Global Digital Archive System (GDA)'

2016 Winner of the DPC Award for the Most Outstanding Digital Preservation Initiative in Industry,
presented by Tim Gollins, National Records of Scotland and Sharon McMeekin, DPC

HSBC’s Global Digital Archive system launched in January 2015. It combines a synchronised Preservica digital repository, with discrete Calm archival management catalogues covering Asia, Europe and North America. This holistic approach to collections management and digital preservation merges ingest and preservation workflows with strong search capabilities, enabling the archivists to curate physical assets, digital copies and born‐digital records on a global basis. The project was successful in demonstrating to ‘big business’ that preservation technology is a truly specialist requirement – separate to traditional document management. It also navigated numerous information security risks
posed in a commercially sensitive and highly regulated environment.

Watch interview with James Mortlock

Amsterdam Museum and Partners, ‘The Digital City revives: A case study of web archaeology.’

2016 Winner of the National Archives Award for Safeguarding the Digital Legacy,
presented by John Sheridan, The National Archives and Louise Lawson, Tate

On 15 January 1994 De Digitale Stad (DDS; The Digital City) opened its virtual gates. DDS, the first virtual city worldwide, made the internet (free) accessible for the first time to the general public in the Netherlands. In 2001 The Digital City, the website, was taken offline. Our digital heritage, and especially the digital memory of the early web, is at risk of being lost. Or worse already gone. In the case study of web archaeology we will answer the questions: how to excavate, reconstruct, preserve and sustainably store born-digital heritage (DDS) and make it accessible to future generations?

Watch interview with Tjarda de Haan and Erwin Verbruggen

Brewster Kahle, Internet Archive

2016 Winner of the DPC Fellowship Award,
presented by Richard Ovenden

Chris Booth of the Internet Archive accepts the Fellowship Award on behalf of Brewster Kahle.

Watch Brewster Kahle's acceptance video