The Award for the Most Distinguished Student Work in Digital Preservation

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The Finalists: Award for the Most Distinguished Student Work in Digital Preservation

DPA 2026 Award Title Banners webpages Student work

This award encourages and recognizes student work in digital preservation. The prize in this category consists of a trophy to be retained by the recipient’s institution, certificates for participating individuals, and a travel grant contributing to the costs of attendance at an international conference in 2027.

Meet the finalists:

A Digitisation Strategy For Cornish Historical Sources

Nominee: Alice Thacker, studying at King's College London

This dissertation submitted for the MA in Digital Humanities examines how a digitisation strategy for Cornish historical sources could support future discourse around Cornish distinctiveness, particularly through cultural preservation, public access, research, education, and the Cornish language revival. Focusing on materials held by Kresen Kernow and related Cornish cultural institutions, the study argues that these sources are not only archival records but active resources for strengthening understanding of Cornwall’s recognised minority status, language heritage, and cultural identity. Many important manuscripts, maps, records, photographs, and multilingual texts remain accessible only through physical archive visits, limiting their value for local communities, researchers, educators, and wider global audiences.

Preserving ‘Research Objects’ - Challenges and Requirements

Nominee: Manuela Strickland, studying at Aberystwyth University

This master’s dissertation addresses the preservation challenges of digital ‘Research Objects’ (ROs) through active research. ROs are regarded as complete archival representations of scientific studies being ‘self-contained’ and ‘self-describing’. However, their ongoing execution relies on the implementation of web ontologies, linked data, and computational methods.

Building on previous work, the study investigates the significant properties and technical dependencies of two representative case study ROs to determine how effectively they can be preserved and reused using three different RO data models. The study concludes that RO preservation and reuse requires a specialised knowledge base, and multiple dependencies in software, data, and metadata.

The ethical implications of introducing FRT into archival metadata description and catalogue search for photographic and audiovisual collections

Nominee: Rosa Methol, studying at University of Liverpool

This dissertation examines the ethical implications of using facial recognition technology (FRT) in archival metadata creation and catalogue search for photographic and audiovisual collections. Combining a review of existing literature with focus groups involving five archivists, it explores how ethical concerns around biometric recognition technologies are understood in both theory and practice. The findings highlight areas of agreement, such as the need for cautious technology adoption, and areas of tension, including conflicts between improving access to collections and protecting privacy, consent, and limited institutional resources. The study bridges theoretical and practical perspectives and offers a framework for future debate on FRT in archives.