The winners of the prestigious Digital Preservation Awards 2014 have just been announced, at an exciting ceremony hosted by the Digital Preservation Coalition at the Wellcome Trust in London.
Created in 2004 to raise awareness about digital preservation, the Digital Preservation Awards are a prominent celebration of achievement for those people and organisations that have made significant and innovative contributions to ensuring our digital memory is accessible tomorrow.
‘In its early years, the Digital Preservation Award was a niche category in the Conservation Awards’, explained Laura Mitchell, chair of the DPC. ‘But year on year the judges have been impressed by the increasing quality, range and number of nominations. I’m delighted to report that, once again, we have been exhilarated by the quality and number of the nominations. We have given awards to four individuals and organisations that show an incredible depth of insight and subtlety in approach to the thorny question of how to make our digital memory accessible tomorrow. ’
Full list of winners
Four agencies walked away with awards for their exceptional contribution to ensuring the long-term security of digital collections:
The OPF Award for Research and Innovation presented by Ed Fay, OPF and Sandra Collins, Digital Repository of Ireland.
The University of Freiburg and partners with ‘bwFLA Functional Long Term Archiving and Access.’
The bwFLA (Functional Long Term Archiving and Access) project provides distributed, scalable and cost-effective cloud-based ‘emulation as a service’ preservation framework. The judges were commended the project for its ability to enable convenient access to emulation technology for preservation of born-digital assets.
The DPC Award for the Most Distinguished Student Work in Digital Preservation presented by Rachel Bruce, Jisc and Tim Gollins, The National Archives
Alasdair Bachell from the University of Glasgow with ‘Game Preservation in the UK.’
Alasdair’s work builds on a report of preservation practices carried out by the video games industry, and examines the video game industry's attitudes towards preservation in the UK. The judges were impressed with the recommendations for the games archival community the report provided and that the work represented such a comprehensive study of records management practices in the games industry.
The NCDD Award for Teaching and Communications presented by Marcel Ras, KB/NCDD and Ingrid Dillo, DANS.
Adrian Brown for his ‘Practical Digital Preservation: a how to guide for organizations of any size.’
Based on his own experience of building operational digital preservation services in three different institutions, Adrian’s book ‘Practical Digital Preservation: a how-to guide for organisations of any size’ provides practical guidance tailored to smaller organizations. The judges said that this resource stood out for providing smaller organisation with the confidence, tools and knowledge to develop their own digital preservation capabilities.
The DPC Award for Safeguarding the Digital Legacy presented by Maureen Pennock, British Library and Paul Wheatley.
University of Manchester for their ‘Carcanet Press Email Archive.’
The University of Manchester Library holds outstanding eighteenth and nineteenth-century literary correspondence collections, relating to Samuel Johnson, Elizabeth Gaskell and others; a testament to the golden age of letter-writing. Judges were delighted with the way the Carcanet Press Email Preservation Project has ensured that some of the fruits of email’s golden age are similarly safeguarded for future generations.
The contributions of nine other exceptional finalists were also marked in the ceremony introduced by Robert Kiley, Head of Digital Services at the Wellcome Library, one of the world's major resources for the study of medical history.