Digital Preservation Award

The 2007 Conservation Awards - Digital Preservation Award
Short-list Announcement

The Digital Preservation Award of UKP5,000 is sponsored by the
Digital Preservation Coalition. This prestigious Award recognises
achievement and encourages innovation in the new and challenging
field of digital preservation--simply put, preserving things whose
very existence depends on computers.

Short-listed for the Digital Preservation Award are:

    1. LIFE: The British Library.

    LIFE (Lifecycle Information for E-Literature) has made a major
    contribution to understanding the long-term costs of digital
    preservation, an essential step in helping institutions plan for
    the future. Its methodology models the digital lifecycle and
    calculates the costs of preserving digital information for the
    next 5, 10 or 100 years. Organisations can apply this process to
    understand costs and focus resources on those items or
    collections most in need of them.

    2. Web Curator Tool software development project: National
    Library of New Zealand and The British Library.

    The web is a huge and interconnected digital asset with which we
    are all familiar, and one in which material changes and
    disappears with frightening regularity. Conscious of this
    problem, the National Library of New Zealand and The British
    Library worked together in an international collaboration to
    build this tool, which supports selective and thematic
    web-harvesting by collaborating users in a library environment.
    Swift development over just 10 months enabled it to be released
    as free software for the benefit of the international
    web-archiving community in September 2006, from
    webcurator.sf.net.

    3. Active Preservation at The National Archives - PRONOM
    Technical Registry and DROID file format identification tool:
    The National Archives of the UK.

    One of the fundamental challenges of digital preservation is to
    understand the technologies required to access digital
    information, and plan the actions we will need to take to ensure
    continued access in the future in the face of constant
    technological change. Is the software needed to read this
    document still supported by the supplier, and is the format of
    this digital movie still readable by most computers? PRONOM is a
    unique and innovative online service which helps to answer
    questions like these and includes a knowledge base of technical
    information about over 600 file formats and 250 software tools,
    which has been developed by The National Archives to answer
    these challenges.

    4. PARADIGM (The Personal Archives Accessible in Digital Media):
    Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, and John Rylands
    University Library, University of Manchester.

    Personal archives are important components of cultural memory,
    but inexperience in curating their modern counterparts--e-mail,
    digital photographs, online calendars, blogs and many more--puts
    the survival of today's personal histories at risk. The
    diversity and volatility of digital technology far exceeds that
    of any medium that creators, archivists and researchers have
    previously worked with. The Paradigm project has worked with
    politicians, archivists and researchers to investigate these
    challenges in an exemplar project so that the archives of
    significant contemporaries can continue to enrich our history.

    5. Digital Repository Audit and Certification: CRL, RLG-OCLC,
    NARA, the DCC, DPE and Nestor.

    As the number of organisations, both public and private,
    preserving digital information increases, it becomes important
    to be able to assess how well they are doing and how
    well-prepared they are for the unknown challenges of the future.
    The Trustworthy Repositories Audit and Certification (TRAC)
    Criteria and Checklist (maintained by the US Center for Research
    Libraries), the nestor project's Criteria Catalogue and the
    Digital Repository Audit Method Based on Risk Assessment
    (DRAMBORA) published by the Digital Curation Centre and
    DigitalPreservationEurope present complementary methods for the
    self assessment, audit and certification of digital repository
    infrastructures.

All the short-listed projects will give a presentation to the
Digital Preservation Award judges on 19 June. The winners of the
Conservation Awards 2007 will be announced at the British Museum on
27 September 2007.

The Digital Preservation Coalition was established in 2001 to foster
joint action to address the urgent challenges of securing the
preservation of digital resources in the UK and to work with others
internationally to secure our global digital memory and knowledge
base. For further information see <URL:http://www.dpconline.org/>.

2007 Judges

    Kevin Ashley (Chair of the Judging Panel)
    Head of Digital Archives
    Department, University of London Computer Centre.

    Michael Day
    Research Officer at UKOLN, University of Bath.

    Helen Hockx-Yu
    Programme Manager, Joint Information Systems Committee
    (JISC).

    William Kilbride
    Research Manager, Glasgow Museums.

    Andreas Rauber
    Associate Professor, Department of Software Technology and
    Interactive Systems (IFS), The Vienna University of Technology.

    Chris Rusbridge
    Director, Digital Curation Centre (DCC).

    Helen Shenton
    Head of Collection Care, the British Library.

    Dave Thompson
    Digital Curator, Wellcome Library.

For further information on the judges see
<URL:http://www.dpconline.org/graphics/awards/2007panel.html>

Carol Jackson
Administration Manager
Digital Preservation Coalition
Innovation Centre
York Science Park
Heslington YO10 5DG
+44 1904 435 362


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                  Conservation DistList Instance 21:11
                   Distributed: Sunday, June 17, 2007
                       Message Id: cdl-21-11-001
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