We are pleased to share that the Digital Repository of Ireland’s (DRI) Community Archive Scheme is one of four finalists for the Ireland eGovernment Awards 2024 in the Open Data Category.
The Ireland eGovernment Awards celebrate and honour excellence, innovation, and creativity in the Irish Public Sector. The Awards are the recognised benchmark for excellence in Ireland’s Digital Government services and standards. DRI won three Ireland eGovernment awards in 2014 for Inspiring Ireland, an ambitious project DRI spearheaded in collaboration with eight of Ireland’s National Cultural Institutions, and the Department of Arts, Heritage, and the Gaeltacht. Having been on hiatus since the COVID-19 pandemic, we are delighted that the Ireland eGovernment Awards are back, celebrating 21 years of recognising and awarding the pioneers in digital government, both national and local.
The Ireland eGovernment Awards Open Data Category recognises initiatives, like the DRI Community Archive Scheme, that demonstrate comprehensive data accessibility, usability, and societal impact. Launched in 2019, the DRI Community Archive Scheme offers free DRI Associate Membership and bespoke digital preservation training and support to under-resourced community archivists and community groups. The time, effort, and skill that goes into creating community-based archives is often undertaken by individuals or groups working on a voluntary basis or with little funding. The aim of the DRI Community Archive Scheme is to provide digital preservation support and share DRI’s profession-based knowledge in order to empower community archivists and community groups to curate, preserve, and share their digital collections in an open access format.
The Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC) classifies community archives as ‘critically endangered’ on the Global ‘Bit List’ of Endangered Digital Species, a community-sourced list of at-risk digital materials. It is, therefore, vital that community archivists are provided with digital preservation support as ‘t]he loss of tools, data or services within this group would impact on people and sectors around the world’. The Community Archive Scheme, which waives the DRI membership fee, offers underfunded community-centred archives an alternative route to the traditional paid Membership Model used to support DRI member organisations in the higher education and cultural heritage sectors.
The Scheme is now in its sixth year and has supported numerous community archives and community groups to safeguard their digitised and born-digital data in the DRI repository, where DRI provides open access to the digital data, as well as contributing to the long-term preservation of the digital assets. Previous winners include: Cork LGBT Archive (2019); Asylum Archive (2020), Cork Community Media Hub (formerly Frameworks Media and Archive Centre) (2020), Dublin-based Community Films by Joe Lee (2021); Dublin Ghost Signs (2021); the Elephant Collective (2021); Bray Arts (2022); Tulsk History Society (2022); Dublin Digital Radio (2023); and Folklore.ie (2024). In a recent DRI Member Case Study, Orla Egan, founder of the Cork LGBT Archive and inaugural winner of the DRI Community Archive Scheme, reflected on the challenges of preserving community-generated digital material and the benefits of the DRI Community Archive Scheme, stating that:
Ensuring robust digital preservation is difficult for community archives – not to mention the workload and additional learning that is needed to ensure long-term digital preservation… We are lucky in Ireland to have an organisation with the resources and skills to help us achieve our goals: the Digital Repository of Ireland.
DRI is proud to collaborate with care with community groups to ensure that long-term preservation and open access publication of digital materials is open to a wide range of archival initiatives, including those operating on a non-funded, voluntary basis. We’re honoured that the DRI Community Scheme is being recognised along with the other exceptional finalists in the Ireland eGovernment Awards 2024 for using open data to address public challenges.
The winners of the Ireland eGovernment Awards 2024 will be announced at the 2024 21st Ireland eGovernment Digital Awards & Summit 2024 on Thursday, 19 September.
The DRI Community Archive Scheme 2025 is open for applications until Friday, 8 November 2024. Learn more about this initiative on the DRI Community Archive Scheme page.
