This award celebrates efforts that support and maintain critical infrastructure for digital preservation services and systems, ensuring the integrity and resilience of digital preservation workflows. The award includes a cash prize of £1000, a trophy and certificates.
Meet the finalists:
PRONOM refresh
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Nominee: Steve Daly PRONOM is a registry of file format information which underpins digital preservation workflows used by archives worldwide, but after 20+ years it faced growing technical and sustainability risks. With no dedicated funding, a small team proactively rebuilt the service using a radically-lightweight, open architecture incorporating automated testing and zero-idle infrastructure. This improved security, running costs, environmental sustainability, and delivers a highly-accessible and responsive website whilst enabling programmatic reuse of data. Delivered as a minimal-viable-product with continuous deployment, the new PRONOM secures the future of a critical community resource and redefines how registries such as this can be sustainably maintained. |
Data Integrity Application for the Everyday User: Developing and Implementing Basic Integrity Checks Applied in Abu Dhabi During Times of Regional Conflict
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Nominee: Rebecca Pittam To address NYU Abu Dhabi Library’s preservation needs during the 2025-2026 academic year, we developed a custom “Data Integrity Application” designed for accessibility across all expertise levels. With a click of a button, and utilizing forensic audit principles, the tool ensures data authenticity by tracking the "digital fingerprint" of every file. By democratizing complex preservation tasks for a small team of archivists and assistants, the tool served as a vital bridge between high-security servers and emergency off-site redundancy during the recent Middle East regional conflict. This initiative resulted in a successful 100% audit of two terabytes of institutional digital assets. |
CoreTrustSeal: A Global, Community-Driven Model for Trustworthy Digital Repositories
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Nominee: CoreTrustSeal CoreTrustSeal is an international, community-driven certification that helps verify that repository holdings are safe, reliable, and available for future use. It recognizes repositories that meet high standards for managing, preserving, and sharing digital materials through independent peer review. By earning this certification, repositories demonstrate they can be trusted to care for valuable digital materials and make them accessible to researchers and the public for the long-term. CoreTrustSeal supports open science by helping people find and reuse digital materials with confidence, strengthening research, innovation, and informed decision-making. |
