THE 2007 CONSERVATION AWARDS  - DIGITAL PRESERVATION AWARD 
Short-list Announcement 
 
The Digital Preservation Award of £5,000 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 
& 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, & 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.
 
- Ends -
 
 
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Notes to Editors: 
The Conservation Awards are the UK’s leading awards for the preservation of
cultural heritage. They are sponsored by Sir Paul McCartney and supported by
key organisations in conservation and collections care: the Museums,
Libraries and Archives Council (MLA), English Heritage, the Institute of
Conservation (Icon) and the National Preservation Office. The Digital
Preservation Coalition and the Anna Plowden Trust sponsor the awards in
their names. For more information visit the Awards website:
www.conservationawards.org.uk which includes links to information about the
supporting partners and sponsors. 
 
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 the website at: 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.
 
See the Digital Preservation Coalition website for further information on
the judges: http://www.dpconline.org/graphics/awards/2007panel.html
Carol Jackson
Administration Manager
Digital Preservation Coalition
Innovation Centre
York Science Park
Heslington
YO10 5DG

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tel: +44 (0) 1904 435 362
https: www.dpconline.org