International team wins the 2005 Digital Preservation Award

Information obtained from the PADI-Forum mailing list.

The PREMIS Working Group – a team of 30 experts from five countries – was awarded the prestigious Digital Preservation Award for 2005 tonight by Loyd Grossman OBE FSA at the annual Conservation Awards ceremony held at the British Library.

This is the tenth anniversary of the Conservation Awards, which this year has a new sponsor - Sir Paul McCartney. This is the second year to include the DPC-sponsored £5,000 Digital Preservation Award, which was awarded to the PREMIS Working Group for “leadership and advancement in digital preservation which will benefit the UK”.

The winning team’s work is to do with “preservation metadata”, which is essential to ensure that digital objects remain accessible over time. . The work of the PREMIS Working Group goes a long way towards establishing an international open-source standard for handling metadata, which will help libraries and institutions around the world to archive digital content – the volume of which is doubling every year.

The PREMIS team were chosen ahead of four other shortlisted projects, including overseas entries from the Vienna University of Technology and the National Archive of the Netherlands. Two UK entries also made the shortlist: a team from the BBC for their work rescuing and restoring early colour programming (including unseen episodes of Dr WHO); and the UK Web Archiving Consortium, a group lead by the British Library, which is creating a searchable archive of selected UK websites.

The judges were impressed by the work PREMIS has done in compiling a “data dictionary” identifying core digital preservation metadata, which they have supported with practical examples and a software protocol. A key factor in the decision was the international scope of PREMIS, and the consensus building and collaboration that is so crucial in so many digital preservation issues.

Richard Boulderstone, Chair of the Judging Panel, said: "The DPC is delighted to again have had a very strong shortlist for their annual Award, with entries from both the UK and overseas. This demonstrates an increasing awareness of digital preservation and the need to find workable solutions."

In his original presentation to the judging panel, Brian Lavoie of the PREMIS Working group said: "This work illustrates a gradual shift from articulating the problem to solving it ... it's not so much 'Why is digital preservation important?' anymore; rather, 'What must be done to achieve preservation objectives?'.”

Preservation metadata was crucial to implementing reliable, sustainable digital preservation programs, he said. “The issues of long term storage of digital resources are unique to the digital space. A digital object needs to be supported, wrapped in this metadata so it can be kept.”

TV presenter and culinary entrepreneur Loyd Grossman, who helped to launch the DPC in 2002, presented the award. “It’s reassuring to see how much things have progressed since we started, but it is still daunting to realise how much still needs to be done,” he said. “History will judge us very harshly if we are unable to overcome the obstacles to preserving access to our burgeoning digital cultural heritage so we need to encourage and reward those who are working to secure it. “