Digital Preservation Awards 2018

Watch the ceremony

Watch the Digital Preservation Awards ceremony, filmed live in November 2018 at the Amsterdam Museum in the Netherlands.

Meet the Winners

Stanford University Libraries, ePADD 

2018 Winner of the Software Sustainability Institute (SSI) Award for Research and Innovation presented by Neil Chue Hong, SSI and Natalie Harrower, Digital Repository of Ireland ePADD is free and open source software developed by Stanford University Libraries and partners that supports the appraisal, processing, preservation, discovery, and delivery of email archives of potential historical or cultural value. Over the past five years, ePADD has pioneered the application of machine learning and natural language processing to confront challenges that collection donors, archivists, and researchers routinely face in donating, administering, preserving, or accessing email collections. This includes screening email for confidential, restricted, or legally-protected information, preparing email for preservation, and making the resulting files (which incorporates preservation actions taken by the repository) discoverable and accessible to researchers. Watch interview with Josh Schneider Watch DPA2018 Winners Webinar on ePADD

Jennifer Allen, Matthew Farrell, Shira Peltzman, Alice Prael and Dorothy Waugh; The Archivist’s Guide to Kryoflux 

2018 Winner of the DPC Award for Teaching and Communications, presented by Sally McInnes, National Library of Wales and Neil Grindley, Jisc For archivists preserving and providing access to data stored on floppy disks, the KryoFlux offers significant benefits. This floppy disk controller supports a variety of legacy encoding formats, effectively handles degraded data, and creates bit-for-bit disk images suitable for long-term preservation. Unfortunately, existing documentation for the KryoFlux is scant and assumes a level of technical knowledge largely absent from archival literature and curricula. The Archivist’s Guide to KryoFlux is a manual designed to fill that gap. Written specifically for archivists, it provides clear instructions for practitioners using the KryoFlux to support the preservation of important cultural heritage data. Watch interview with Dorothy Waugh Watch DPA2018 Winners Webinar on Archivists Guide to the Kryoflux

Anna Oates; University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign 

2018 Winner of the National Records of Scotland (NRS) Award for the Most Distinguished Student Work in Digital Preservation, presented by Laura Mitchell, NRS and Laura Molloy, University of Oxford The PDF/A standard is a component of many institutional repository file format policies. However, full conformance with the standard is often difficult to achieve for born-digital documents. This paper presents findings from trial migrations/normalization to PDF/A of student papers held in the Oxford University Research Archive. The study tested multiple PDF/A creation software and format validation tools in use by institutions. It further presents findings from interviews with institutional repository staff currently using the standard within their workflows. With these datasets as its basis, the paper identifies common occurrences of non-conformances with the PDF/A standard and discusses to what extent these non-conformances present preservation risks. Watch interview with Anna Oates Watch DPA2018 Winners Webinar with Anna Oates

Crossrail and Transport for London; Archiving Crossrail 

2018 Winner of the Open Data Institute (ODI) Award for the Most Outstanding Digital Preservation Initiative in Commerce, Industry and the Third Sector, presented by David Beardmore, ODI and Sheila Morrissey, Portico The Crossrail Act giving permission for what is now called the Elizabeth Line to be built operated and maintained received Royal Assent in July 2008. Over the next 10 years Europe’s biggest infrastructure project at £14.8 billion has integrated the information developed from over 25 main design contracts, 30 advanced work contracts and 60+ logistics and main works contracts. Crossrail embraced BIM (Building Information Modelling) with a single set of linked applications shared with contractors across all phases of the project. The challenge for the archive team was to preserve a heavily interlinked dataset without having to retain legacy software. Watch interview with Alastair Goodall Watch DPA2018 Winners Webinar on Archiving Crossrail

IFI Irish Film Archive; IFI Loopline Project 

2018 Winner of the National Archives Award for Safeguarding the Digital Legacy, presented by Valerie Johnson, The National Archives and Neil Jefferies Frustrated by budget constraints & unresponsive commercial vendors the IFI Irish Film Archive was inspired by the FLOSS community to develop a suite of 55 open source scripts (IFIScripts) that support our digital preservation activities in a sustainable and efficient manner. Solving problems in-house has reduced our maintenance costs and vendor fees and allowed us to take control of our preservation workflows. Not only has IFIScripts helped us to fulfil our digital preservation remit within our limited staff and financial resources, but we sharing all our tools with the preservation community on Githib for others to use and adapt. We are currently completing our first end- to- end application of the IFI Scripts on a preservation projection for a collection of material from a leading Irish film production company called Loopline Films. Watch interview with Kasandra O'Connell and Kieran O'Leary Watch DPA2018 Winners Webinar on the IFI Irish Film Archive Loopline Project

Barbara Sierman

2018 Winner of the DPC Fellowship Award, presented by Richard Ovenden, Bodleian Libraries        Watch interview with Barbara Sierman

The Digital Preservation Awards 2018 Finalists 

The Software Sustainability Institute Award for Research and Innovation ePADD, University of Stanford VeraPDF, Open Preservation Foundation Contributions towards Defining the Discipline, Sarah Higgins - Aberystwyth University Flashback: Preservation of legacy digital collections, British Library	The DPC Award for Teaching and Communications Evidence-­based postgraduate education in digital information management, University College Dublin Leren Preserveren (Learning Digital Preservation), Digital Heritage Network and Het Nieuwe Instituut Ibadan/Liverpool Digital Curation Curriculum Review Project, Universities of Ibadan and Liverpool The Archivist’s Guide to KryoFlux, Universities of Texas, Duke, Los Angeles, Yale and Emory
The National Records of Scotland Award for the Most Distinguished Student Work in Digital Preservation 'Navigating the PDF/A Standard: A Case Study of Theses' by Anna Oates, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign 'Preserving the past: the challenge of digital archiving within a Scottish Local Authority' by Lorraine Murray, University of Glasgow 'Essay on the record-making and record-keeping issues implicit in Wearables' by Philippa Turner, University of Liverpool	The Open Data Institute Award for the Most Outstanding Digital Preservation Initiative in Commerce, Industry and the Third sector Music Treasures, Stichting Omroep Muziek (SOM) Archiving Crossrail - Europe’s largest infrastructure project, Crossrail and Transport for London Heritage preservation of contemporary dance and choreography through research and innovation in digital documentation and annotation of creative processes, ICKamsterdam and Motion Bank
The National Archives Award for Safeguarding the Digital Legacy IFI Open Source tools: IFIscripts/ Loopline project, IFI Irish Film Archive Cloud-Enabled Preservation of Life in the 20th Century White House, White House Historical Association Digital Library Design, Deliver, Embed: Establishing Digital Transfer in Parliament, UK Parliamentary Archives Local Authority Digital Preservation Consortium: Dorset History Centre, West Sussex Records Office, Wiltshire & Swindon History Centre In the category of 'Safeguarding the Digital Legacy' The judges also offered a special commendation to the GI Press Collection

The DPC extends grateful thanks to our international panel of Judges and all of our sponsors who made the Digital Preservation Awards 2018 a possibility: