The Digital Repository of Ireland (DRI) is the proud sponsor of the Digital Preservation Award 2024 for Research and Innovation. This Award acknowledges exceptional contributions to practical research and innovation activities. The prize in this category consists of a trophy to be retained by the recipient, certificates for participating individuals, and a cash prize of £1000 payable to the lead nominee’s institution.
Created by the Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC) to raise awareness about digital preservation, the Digital Preservation Awards celebrate the work of the global digital preservation community. There are 7 Award categories recognising projects and collaborations which work together to bring about a sustainable future for our digital assets. The awards will be presented at an exciting ceremony at the iPres 2024 Conference on Monday 16 September 2024.
As the sponsor of the Award for Research and Innovation, DRI is pleased to spotlight the four finalists in this category.
Digital Archiving: Storage Media Prioritisation Methodology and Tools
Nominees: Archives and Special Collections, University of Glasgow
The storage media prioritisation methodology and tool provide a simple way to gauge the well-being of various types of computer storage – both contemporary and legacy. They are primarily geared towards helping digital archivists prioritise the processing of computer storage media, but anyone can use the tool to quickly assess if a storage medium is at-risk of data loss. The tool generates a prioritisation score based on the type of storage, the conditions in which it has been kept and other criteria collated from resources generated by the digital archiving and preservation community. It has been developed by Archives & Special Collections at the University of Glasgow and is available for free under a Creative Commons licence. Find out more about Digital Archiving: Storage Media Prioritisation Methodology and Tools.
Disentangling Digital Preservation Risk with CHARM
Nominee: Dr. Maureen Pennock
CHARM contributes a new disciplinary solution to the wicked problem of digital preservation risk. Delivered through an innovative practice-based PhD research programme that blends digital preservation thinking with design science and risk science, CHARM explores and represents the nature and complexity of digital preservation risk in the field’s first unified and holistic digital preservation risk reference model. It brings clarity to its conceptual nature and inherent complexity, exploring the importance of contextualisation for risk characterisation and presenting not only a rigorous academic exploration, but also practical methods and re-usable templates for scenario-based digital preservation risk identification and assessment in organisations. Find out more about Disentangling Digital Preservation Risk with CHARM.
Improving access to and sustainability of the Pacific and Regional Archive for Digital Sources in Endangered Cultures (PARADISEC)
Nominees: Pacific and Regional Archive for Digital Sources in Endangered Cultures (PARADISEC)
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. Find out more about 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
Nominees: The ‘Play It Again’ team, Australian Centre for the Moving Image and AARNet
The Australian videogame preservation project “Play It Again” is a competitively-funded Australian Research Council (ARC) Linkage Project, involving Swinburne and RMIT universities and partners ACMI and AARNet. The project aimed to preserve and emulate fifty significant Australian videogames from the 1990s, exhibiting six selected games alongside key information on their production and consumption histories and preservation tools used. The project evaluated the Emulation-as-a-Service Infrastructure (EaaSI) platform’s efficacy for accessing born digital artefacts and used it to make historic games playable for ACMI visitors. The project laid the foundations for the AusEaaSI emulation network and Community of Practice (launched February 2024). Find out more about Play It Again: Preserving Australian Videogame History of the 1990s.
Find out more about the 7 Digital Preservation Award categories on the DPC website.
