With the Digital Preservation Awards (DPA) ceremony approaching on 15 October, the Digital Preservation Coalition invites you to hear directly from the 2026 finalists! This week, the people behind the shortlisted projects introduce their digital preservation work and the challenges they are tackling through a series of short videos.
The Digital Preservation Awards celebrate achievement in digital preservation across eight categories. We begin our video introductions with the Award for Research and Innovation, generously sponsored by the National Library and Archives Board, Singapore. This category recognizes exceptional contributions to practical research and innovation, celebrating work that develops new approaches and advances digital preservation practice.
From making handwritten archives searchable to describing core preservation processes and exploring DNA storage, the three finalists in the Research & Innovation category demonstrate the variety of innovation taking place across the field:
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AI-Enabled Transcription and Dissemination of Handwritten Documents from the Municipal Archive of La Nucía uses artificial intelligence to help people read and search historical handwritten documents, opening up local history to citizens, students and researchers.
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EOSC EDEN Core Preservation Processes (CPPs) provides a set of 30 processes to help institutions develop their digital preservation capabilities, with practical guidance for implementing processes and workflows.
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An OAIS-Compliant Archiving Platform with DNA Connector within OLOS integrates DNA-based archival storage into a digital preservation platform, exploring how archives can be encoded, stored and retrieved using DNA.
Who better to introduce these projects than the people behind them? Take a few minutes to hear their stories and discover the ideas that have earned them a place among the DPA 2026 finalists:
The winner will be revealed at the Digital Preservation Awards ceremony in Warsaw on Thursday 15 October 2026, hosted by FINA as part of the No Time to Wait 10 conference. You can join the celebrations online from 16:00–17:15 UTC (18:00–19:15 in Warsaw), with the livestream available on the Digital Preservation Awards page on the day.
Keep an eye out for more finalist videos as we count down to the ceremony!