This award acknowledges exceptional contributions to practical research and innovation activities. The prize in this category consists of a trophy to be retained by the recipient, certificates for participating individuals, and a cash prize of £1000 payable to the lead nominee’s institution.
Meet the finalists:
Transcripción y difusión de la documentación manuscrita del archivo municipal de La Nucía mediante el uso de inteligencia artificial / AI-Enabled Transcription and Dissemination of Handwritten Documents from the Municipal Archive of La Nucía
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Nominees: Archivo Municipal de La Nucía The La Nucía Municipal Archive project uses artificial intelligence to make historical handwritten documents accessible to everyone. Over 30,000 pages have been digitised, and 10,000 pages—mainly council minute books dating back to the 18th century—have been automatically transcribed using advanced technology. This allows users to read and search documents that were previously difficult to understand. A new, user-friendly website provides open access to this material, benefiting citizens, students, and researchers alike. The project transforms a traditional archive into a modern, searchable resource, helping people connect with their local history in an easy and meaningful way. |
EOSC EDEN Core Preservation Processes (CPPs)
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Nominees: Micky Lindlar, Bertrand Caron, Juha Lehtonen, Maria Benauer, Johan Kylander, Kris Dekeyser, Matthew Addis, Mattias Levlin, Mikko Laukkanen, Felix Burger, Tiina Koho, Franziska Schwab, Laura Molloy, Fen Zhang Digital Preservation knows many processes - but what do these processes look like? And where can institutions that are planning to grow their digital preservation capability find reference process descriptions? Until recently, such a point of reference was missing. The Core Preservation Processes (CPPs) are a set of 30 processes that every digital archive should undertake, either by itself or through an associated service. Identified and described within the EOSC EDEN project, they aim to provide practical implementation guidance for digital preservation processes and workflows. |
An OAIS-Compliant Archiving Platform with DNA Connector within OLOS
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Nominees: Pierre-Yves Burgi, Hugues Cazeaux, Dario Genga, Michaël El Kharroubi, Florient Serex, Jérôme Charmet This nomination focuses on a DNA-based archival storage system within OLOS.swiss, an OAIS-compliant preservation system. A connector enables both the encoding of archives into DNA, and communication with a micro-factory that performs all the genomic processes necessary for the storage and retrieval of the archives. Preliminary experiments demonstrate the successful encoding/decoding of megabyte-scale files, despite high error rates associated with DNA-related processes. This work contributes to the autonomous DNA data storage by demonstrating its integration into an OAIS-compliant long-term preservation system, showing that DNA preservation can function as a production platform and no longer merely as a laboratory proof-of-concept. |
