The Digital Repository of Ireland (DRI) was the proud sponsor of the Digital Preservation Award 2024 for Research and Innovation at this year’s annual Digital Preservation Awards, which were hosted by the Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC) as part of the iPres 2024 Conference in Ghent, Belgium, on Monday 16 September 2024.
DRI Director Dr Lisa Griffith presented the Award for Research and Innovation to the Pacific and Regional Archive for Digital Sources in Endangered Cultures (PARADISEC). PARADISEC holds records from 1,370 small languages, mainly audio recordings made by linguists and musicologists since the 1950s, and mainly from the Pacific. It has 16,000 hours of audio, 3,000 hours of video, in 230 terabytes of material in 428,000 files. Many of these records represent the only online presence of records in these languages. The collection serves both a research and a community purpose. A major aim of this work is to curate the digital files for return to and access by the speakers of these languages. This year, an initiative was undertaken to move all items to Research-Object Crate (RO-Crate) format, and to store the collection in Amazon S3. RO-Crate is a standard that uses JSON-LD, and allows the whole collection to contain self-describing items so makes it more durable over time, and less reliant on a catalogue that is at risk of failure, with consequent metadata loss.
Julia Miller accepted the DRI Award for Research and Innovation on behalf of PARADISEC, commenting that one of the strengths of the project is that it ‘has created this way that we can bring these recordings that we have in our collections back to the communities’ (Digital Preservation Awards 2024 – Interview with the Research and Innovation Award Winner).
DRI Director Dr Lisa Griffith congratulated the winner and recognised the outstanding achievements of all the nominees:
All of the finalists in this category made valuable contributions to the field of digital preservation and it was a difficult category to judge. I was delighted to present this award to PARADISEC. Their methodology, and the work they are doing to preserve endangered languages, sets new standards in digital archiving.
PARADISEC was nominated alongside four other initiatives that have made an exceptional contribution to practical research and innovation activities. The nominees included Disentangling Digital Preservation Risk with CHARM, Play It Again: Preserving Australian Videogame History of the 1990s, Digital Archiving: Storage Media Prioritisation Methodology and Tools.
Find out more about all the finalists for the DRI Award for Research and Innovation on the DPC website.
