Nominee: Good Old Games (GOG)

The GOG Preservation Program is a systematic effort by GOG, a PC digital distribution platform, to maintain playability of classic video games on current and future gaming systems. Since its public launch in November 2024, the program has grown to cover 267 titles, with over 1,400 applied fixes, improvements, and, whenever possible, restored content. Each title undergoes dedicated technical work — from custom DirectX wrapping to installer rebuilds — backed by a long-term commitment to ongoing maintenance. GOG also contributes to broader industry preservation efforts through its EFGAMP board membership and public advocacy, including a dedicated game preservation panel at GDC 2026.

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Nominee: NAACP Legal Defense Fund Archives Team

The NAACP Legal Defense Fund (LDF) is a nonprofit law firm spearheading the fight for civil rights since 1940. In Fall 2024, the Archives Team launched LDF Recollection, a public digital repository containing over 13,000 institutional records. Our mission is to steward and share this collection documenting the historic and ongoing struggle for civil justice and political, educational, and economic equity. With our partners at Durable Digital, we have innovated a digitization workflow supporting the unique preservation and security needs of a legal civil rights archive by integrating Recollection with archival software and a customer relations management database.

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Nominee: Alice McFarlane, Diageo Archive

The Diageo Archive AI Cataloguing Assistant application is an Azure-hosted prototype that automates and embeds preservation-aware metadata creation, validation, and quality control into archive cataloguing workflows. It improves metadata consistency, reduces manual effort, and strengthens the long-term accessibility and usability of born-digital and digitised heritage assets. Combining OCR, image analysis, structured metadata mapping, and human quality assurance, it enables scalable, auditable cataloguing while retaining archivist oversight. The initiative demonstrates how AI can support responsible digital preservation in a commercial context by reducing risk, improving data quality, and enabling sustainable management and automation of digital collections at scale.

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Nominee: Miguel Angel Mardero Arellano

The Brazilian Training Program of the Cariniana Network aims to offer open and advanced courses that address essential aspects of digital preservation. The program's main objective is to provide students with an in-depth understanding of the fundamental concepts of digital preservation. The program's structure and the active participation of researchers from the DRÍADE Research Group consolidate a continuous learning ecosystem, promoting specialized and accessible training for professionals from diverse fields. The modular approach and synchronous interaction enabled not only the transmission of technical knowledge but also the exchange of experiences and the development of proposals applicable to the realities of the participating institutions.

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Nominee: Dylan Bremner

Dylan Bremner, Digital Archivist at the City of Edmonton Archives in Canada, has supported his professional association, the Archives Society of Alberta, by sharing his expertise with the archival community. He developed and taught a Digital Archival Program Workshop which gave small archives throughout the province knowledge on how to start a digital archives program and to digitize/migrate and preserve tape cassettes, VHS and optical discs. The workshop simplified complex technical concepts and archival theories for participants who are not formally trained in the archival profession. The training has provided small archives with capacity to begin programs for digital archives.

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Nominee: Dr Andrea Kocsis

Digital Ghosts is a practice-based research project with a huge impact and an even bigger heart. Centred on a public exhibition at Inspace Gallery, Edinburgh, it used creative visualisations and data-physicalisation artworks built from the Scotland on the Internet collection of the UK Web Archive, curated at the National Library of Scotland, to engage non-specialist audiences with web preservation. The project asked how visualising messy, fragmented GLAM metadata can communicate the scale of web decay, and how this creative approach can facilitate the use of web archives by exposing the heroic web preservation efforts.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Nominees: Sofie Ruysseveldt and Ruben Van Driessche (Digital Archives Flanders)

This initiative provides local authorities in Flanders (Belgium) with a practical blueprint for managing environmental permit files in a fully digital way. By combining a framework agreement for digitisation with sustainable archiving and access, it treats digitisation, preservation and reuse as one coherent chain. Through direct integration between permit management software and the Digital Archives Flanders (DAV) E‑depot, archiving is embedded in daily administrative processes (archiving by design). Using shared services and existing Flemish digital building blocks, the project reduces complexity for local authorities while ensuring reliable preservation and accessible permit information for public servants, citizens and other stakeholders.

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Nominee: Leontien Talboom (Cambridge University Library)

Future Nostalgia: Safeguarding the knowledge of floppy disks grew out of practical challenges encountered while working directly with legacy media at Cambridge University Library. Faced with limited guidance and uncertainty around best practice, the project set out to capture and share the knowledge needed to work confidently with floppy disks. Through collaboration with practitioners, conservators, and retro-computing communities, it developed the open-access Copy That Floppy! Guide. The project brings together hands-on experience, community knowledge, and experimentation to support others facing similar challenges, helping ensure that the data stored on obsolete media can still be preserved and accessed.

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Nominees: Institute of Information Management (IIM) Africa

The Institute of Information Management (IIM) Africa has advanced digital preservation across Africa through large-scale training, certification, and cross-border collaboration. By integrating digital archiving, data governance, and data protection into professional development programs, IIM has equipped professionals and institutions with the skills to safeguard digital assets for long-term access. Through partnerships spanning multiple countries and sectors, the initiative has strengthened capacity, supported policy development, and enabled sustainable digital preservation practices in emerging economies, addressing critical gaps in digital continuity and information resilience.

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2022 Winner of the International Council on Archives Award for Collaboration and Cooperation
presented by Meg Phillips and Neil Grindley

ARCHIVER is a unique initiative in the context of the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) that spent 3 years developing innovative services for Long Term Digital Preservation of scientific datasets. R&D was performed competitively by commercial suppliers, over 3 phases, selecting pilot services led by Arkivum and LIBNOVA, for scientific data archiving and preservation. The R&D was driven by a diverse range of stakeholders including CERN, operating the Large Hadron Collider near Geneva, DESY (the Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron, in Germany), the EMBL-EBI (European Bioinformatics Institute, in Cambridge), and PIC (Port d’Informació Científica, near Barcelona), contributing high-value datasets associated to the EOSC.

Watch interview with Joao Fernandes, Matthew Addis and Teo Redondo

Watch DPA2022 Winners Webinar on the Archiver Project

2022 Winner of the Software Sustainability Institute (SSI) Award for Research and Innovation
presented by Neil Chue Hong and Kirsty Lingstadt

Many different professional communities are currently working on the preservation of complex digital objects, but there is not a unified structure drawing together all the numerous threads around preserving archaeological virtual reconstructions. This PhD programme showed that archaeological virtual reconstructions are a blend of artistic and scientific creativity. These ‘hybrid digital objects’ require delicate care to be preserved effectively in the long term. Thus, when considering a virtual reconstruction project, there are practical aspects that need to be tackled. In addressing these issues, this thesis presents a foundation (preservation framework) for how those various sectors fit together.

Watch interview with Panagiotis Papageorgiou

Watch DPA2022 Winners Webinar with Panagiotis Papageorgiou

2022 Winner of the The National Archives (UK) Award for the Most Distinguished Student Work in Digital Preservation
presented by April Miller and Lotte Wijsman

CD-ROMs completely changed the realm of artistic possibilities in the 1990s, but have you experienced one in the last ten years or so? The answer is likely no, and that is because CD-ROMs are now an obsolete format. This means that CD-ROMs are no longer made or in use. Further, changes in computer hardware, namely the phasing out of optical disc drives, as well as in operating systems like Mac OS 9, have made it impossible to view and experience the contents of existing artist CD-ROMs. Because of these difficulties, an important part of digital art’s history is in limbo.

As part of their graduate internship with New York University in 2021-22, sasha worked on access to artist CD-ROMs with Collection Care Research at Tate. Keith Piper’s project Relocating the Remains (1999) served as a case study to explore the technical aspects of how to enable interaction with the CD-ROM contents. Sasha also paid attention to maintaining essential characteristics like color, and behaviors like click reaction times or rollover animations, which can be affected by current methods of access. Their research also considered where artist CD-ROMs sit within Tate’s collections and how that affects discoverability and access, as well as available preservation resources.

Watch interview with Sarah Cook who accepted the award on behalf of sasha arden

Watch the DPA2022 Winners Webinar with sasha arden 

2022 Winner of the Research Data Alliance Award for the Most Outstanding Digital Preservation Initiative in Commerce, Industry and the Third Sector
presented by Connie Clare and Karen Sampson

The National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation (NCTR) is devoted to the study of the history and legacy of the Canadian residential school program. In 2020 the NCTR won a $6 million Canadian Foundation for Innovation grant (CFI) to develop a digital preservation program for over four million digital documents and 7,000 recordings of Indigenous testimonies of the history and legacy of the residential school program. The project created a digital infrastructure and workplan for preservation of its digital holdings to make NCTR materials meaningfully available to Indigenous communities in  support of the rights and dignity of Indigenous peoples.

Watch interview with Emmanuel Modozie

Watch the DPA2022 Winners Webinar on the NCTR Digital Preservation Program

2022 winner of the Award for Safeguarding the Digital Legacy
presented by Kieran O'Leary and Patricia Sleeman

The 'Digital Preservation of Reproductive Health Resources: Archiving the 8th' (Archiving Reproductive Health) project aims to provide long-term preservation and access to at-risk born-digital content generated by grassroots women’s reproductive health movements before and during the campaign to repeal the 8th Amendment of the Irish Constitution. Funded by Wellcome and administered by the Digital Repository of Ireland, the project is publishing and making available digital collections from activist organisations that otherwise would be lost. The preservation and publication of these collections add significantly to our understanding of women's rights movements and the history of reproductive healthcare in Ireland.

Watch interview with Clare Lanigan and Lorraine Grimes

Watch the DPA2022 Winners Webinar on the Archiving Reproductive Health Project

2022 Winners of the DPC Fellowship Award
presented by Micky Lindlar and Barbara Sierman

Watch interview with Neil Beagrie

Watch interview with Adrian Brown

Watch the acceptence video from Dr. Denise de Vries, Nancy Y McGovern and Prof. Zhang Xiaolin

ICA Award for Collaboration and Co-operation:

• Kickstart Cymru: Enhancing digital preservation capacity in Wales

• ARCHIVER - Archiving and Preservation for Research Environments

Software Sustainability Institute Award for Research and Innovation:

• The effective preservation of archaeological virtual reconstructions

• Enabling DNA as a digital preservation medium

• Enriching, Empowering, and Futureproofing: The benefits of Linked (Open) Data for archives

Dutch Digital Heritage Network Award for Teaching and Communications: 

• Learning through doing: building digital preservation skills in Wales

• Managing Digital Archives online learning course from ICA

• Professional archives and records education for the 21st Century

The National Archives (UK) Award for the Most Distinguished Student Work:

• Catherine Alexander with 'An Investigation of Environmentally Sustainable Digital Preservation in Scotland'

• Mychely Schubert with 'Blockchain and land property records: a multiple case study identifying barriers'

• sasha arden with 'Access to Artistic Content on CD-ROMs' 

Award for Safeguarding the Digital Legacy:

• Archiving Reproductive Health

• Legacies of Stephen Dwoskin’s Personal Cinema: the digital and archival legacy

• Preserving and sharing the Jeremy Sutton-Hibbert photographic collection  

RDA Award for the Most Outstanding Digital Preservation Initiative in Commerce, Industry and the Third sector:

• National Centre for Truth & Reconciliation

• Long-term preservation of Digital Health Records

• Mahou-San Miguel: Preserving the Legacy of the Leading Spanish Brewery Company 

 The DPC 20^th Anniversary Award:

• PREMIS Data Dictionary and related resources

• Federal Agencies Digital Guidelines Initiative (FADGI): Supporting Collaboration, Cooperation and Community Building for Digital Preservation

• PRONOM Technical Registry

Gabriela Andaur Gomez,
National Archives of Chile

Hilary Hanahoe,
Research Data Alliance (RDA)

Roxana Maurer,
Bibliothèque Nationale du Luxembourg

Meg Phillips,
ICA / U.S. NARA

Angela Beking,
Library and Archives Canada

Natalie Harrower,
Digital Repository of Ireland

Kari May,
NDSA / University of Pittsburgh

Sonia Ranade,
The National Archives UK

Adam Bell,
AARNet

Haliza Jailani,
NLB Singapore

April Miller,
World Bank Group

Karen Sampson,
Lloyds Banking Group

Neil Chue Hong,
Software Sustainability Institute

Neil Jefferies,
Bodleian Libraries

Jenny Mitcham,
DPC

Remco van Veenendaal,
NANETH / Netwerk Digitaal Erfgoed

Neil Grindley,
Jisc

William Kilbride,
DPC

Laura Molloy,
CODATA

Niklas Zimmer,
University of Cape Town Library

Abbie Grotke,
Library of Congress

Kirsty Lingstadt,
University of York

Sheila Morrissey

2024 Winner of the International Council on Archives Award for Collaboration and Cooperation
presented by Gustavo Castaner and April Miller

Collaborative Models of Care was designed to provide a ‘best-practice blueprint’ for non- First Nations professionals wanting to contribute their digitisation and digital preservation skills, knowledge and expertise towards the care of digital cultural heritage held by and produced in Australian First Nations communities. Originally designed by Rebecca Barnott-Clement in the role of Digital Preservation Analyst and subsequently supported by Coby Edgar of Agency Projects, the project involved digitisation of archival assets for Bula’Bula Art Centre and the completion of a DPC RAM assessment (a tool to assess an organisation’s digital preservation maturity) for Bula’Bula Art Centre and Milingimbi Art Centre.

Watch interview with Rebecca Barnott-Clement

Watch the finalist video to find out more

2024 Winner of the Digital Repository of Ireland (DRI) Award for Research and Innovation
presented by Lisa Griffith and Arif Shaon

The Pacific and Regional Archive for Digital Sources in Endangered Cultures (PARADISEC) holds records from 1,370 small languages, mainly audio recordings made since the 1950s. It has 16,000 hours of audio in 230 terabytes of material in 428,000 files stored in Amazon S3. This year’s initiative is to move all items to Research-Object Crate format. RO-Crate allows the whole collection to contain self-describing items so makes it more durable over time, and less reliant on a catalog that is at risk of failure, with consequent metadata loss. This also means they can then be delivered on wifi from a Raspberry Pi device, even in remote offline locations.

Watch interview with Julia Miller

Watch the finalist video to find out more

2024 Winner of the Dutch Digital Heritage Network Award for Teaching and Communications
presented by Marjolein Steeman and Matthew Burgess

Watch interview with Susanne van den Eijkel, Francesca Mackenzie and Lotte Wijsman

Watch the finalist video to find out more

2024 Winner of the CLOCKSS Award for the Most Distinguished Student Work in Digital Preservation
presented by Alicia Wise and Thomas Ledoux

Mexican NGOs work on a wide variety of social problems related to technology, gender, violence, and support for social causes. However, their information and history, produced and disseminated in digital formats, are at risk because the organizations lack adequate digital preservation strategies to ensure the permanence and access of their information in the long term, which is aggravated by problems such as the digital divide or lack of budget. Therefore, Wikimedia Mexico, an NGO that promotes free access to knowledge, is taken as an example to establish digital preservation strategies according to its characteristics and context.

Watch interview with Claudia Muñoz

Watch the finalist video to find out more

2024 Winner of the Research Data Alliance Award for the Most Outstanding Digital Preservation Initiative in Commerce, Industry and the Third Sector 
presented by Hilary Hanahoe and Mihaiela Donisa

Barts Health NHS Trust has implemented a specialist digital archive that ensures records from clinical trials are preserved, accessible and usable for their whole retention period (mainly 25 years). This service is now being extended to other NHS Trusts who are finding it difficult to procure an archive themselves; thus helping to preserve data within wider healthcare research and raising awareness of digital preservation in this area. Barts is at the forefront of digital preservation for research study records as this is a complex and challenging environment that is just starting to generate discussion.

Watch interview Sandra Blake and Jennifer Dando

Watch the finalist video to find out more

2024 winner of the The National Archives (UK) Award for Safeguarding the Digital Legacy
presented by Sonia Ranade and Jo Ana Morfin

DDLD – living archive is the first and only repository preserving and cataloguing the work produced by killed journalists in Mexico. Over 163 reporters have been killed in Mexico since 2000. However, their work is largely unknown and faces the risk of disappearing, either because it was published in websites that lost their domain with the death of their founders or because their content was taken down from social media. Through the DDLD – living archive, over 19,000 published news pieces from 83 journalists killed in Mexico between 2000 and 2023 have been preserved.

Watch interview with Alejandra Ibarra Chaoul

Watch the finalist video to find out more

20244 Winner of the DPC Fellowship Award
presented by Barbara Sierman and Nathan Tallman

Watch the acceptence video from Gladys Kemboi

ICA Award for Collaboration and Co-operation:

• Collaborative models of care: preserving Australian First Nations digital cultural heritage

• Kip-Agenge: Reimagining Partnerships for Digital Preservation Keiyo Indigenous Knowledge for
  Future Generations

• NDSA Staffing Survey Working Group

Digital Repository of Ireland Award for Research and Innovation:

• Digital Archiving: Storage media prioritization methodology and tool

• Disentangling Digital Preservation Risk with CHARM

• Improving access to and sustainability of the Pacific and Regional Archive for Digital Sources in Endangered Cultures (PARADISEC)

• Play It Again: Preserving Australian Videogame History of the 1990s

Dutch Digital Heritage Network Award for Teaching and Communications: 

• Dungeons and Documents

• Preserving Books for Future Generations

• Study group Bits and Bots for building digital skills

The CLOCKSS Award for the Most Distinguished Student Work:

• Nicole Savoy with Assessing the Condition of Net Art Using Emulation as a Service (EaaS)

• Alex Habgood with Bish Bash Backup: A Blog about converting metadata to PREMIS

• Claudia Muñoz with Preservación de documentos digitales: el caso de Wikimedia México / Preservation of digital records: the case of Wikimedia Mexico

• Nicole Hartland with Web Archives for All? Towards Equitable Access to UK Public Sector Web Archives

The National Archives (UK) Award for Safeguarding the Digital Legacy:

• Arquivo.pt catalog of tools for digital preservation

• DDLD – living archive

• Digital Pasifik - Preserving stories, knowledge and tāonga

• National Digital Newspaper Library of Mexico: preservation of digital heritage

RDA Award for the Most Outstanding Digital Preservation Initiative in Commerce, Industry and the Third sector:

• ‘A Lovely Day for Digital Preservation’: Guinness Archive adverts project

• Cloud-based holistic digital preservation at HSBC

• NHS research records: Reducing Risk

Matthew Burgess

State Library of New South Wales

Hilary Hanahoe,
Research Data Alliance (RDA)

April Miller

World Bank Group

Marjolein Steeman

Netwerk Digitaal Erfgoed / 
Beeld en Geluid

Gustavo Castener Marquardt

International Council on Archives 

Haliza Jailani

National Library Board Singapore

Jenny Mitcham

DPC

Nathan Tallman

Academic Preservation Trust

Fatima Darries

University of South Africa (UNISA)

William Kilbride

DPC

Jo Ana Morfin

Memórica - 
Archivo General de la Nación

Melissa Terras

University of Edinburgh

Mihaiela Donisa

Bank for International Settlements 

Nicola Laurent

Australian Society of Archivists 

Sonia Ranade

The National Archives UK

Heather Tompkins

Library and Archives Canada / 
Bibliothèque et Archives Canada 

Lisa Griffith

Digital Repository of Ireland (DRI)

Thomas Ledoux

Bibliothèque nationale
de France (BnF)

Arif Shaon

Qatar National Library

Jessica Venlet

National Digital Stewardship Alliance / 
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Gali Halevi

CLOCKSS

Roxana Maurer

Bibliothèque Nationale
du Luxembourg

Barbara Sierman

Jaye Weatherburn

University of Melbourne 

• Arkivum

• DAMsmart

• HoloMem

• Pictoscope

• Artefactual

• Docbyte

• Iron Mountain

• Preferred Media

• boxxe

• Evolved Binary

• LIBNOVA

•  Preservica 

• cerabyte

• Ex Libris

• Max Communications

• Simon P Wilson  

19 March 2026

Launch of the Digital Preservation Awards 2026

2 April 2026

Second call for nominations

23 April 2026

Final call for nominations

5 May 2026

Nominations close

26 May 2026

First Judging Panel (Shortlisting) 

15 June 2026

Finalists announced and invited to presentation

16 June 2026

Online voting for finalists opens

6 July 2026

Online voting closes

15 July 2026

Second Judging Panel (presentations and interviews with finalists)

15 October 2026

Awards presented