Tuesday 4 December 2012

DPC’s Digital Preservation Awards 2012

I was really pleased to be able to attend the Digital Preservation Awards at the Wellcome Collection in London last night. In it's 10th year, the DPC is celebrating in style with three separate awards:

1. The DPC Decennial Award for an outstanding contribution to digital preservation
2. The DPC Award for Teaching and Communications
3. The DPC Award for Research and Innovation

Participants were encouraged by the chair of the ceremony Richard Ovenden to switch on their mobiles and tweet as the results of each category were announced. The excitement in the room was almost tangible!

I was very pleased and not at all surprised to see that the Digital Preservation Training Programme (DPTP) was the winner of the award for Teaching and Communications. DPTP was quite ground-breaking when it ran its first residential course in digital preservation back in 2005. I was there to help deliver presentations and case studies on the Open Archival Information System (OAIS) and preservation metadata and how we made digital preservation work in practice at the Archaeology Data Service. DPTP has gone from strength to strength ever since and has run courses all over the UK. A worthy winner!

Most exciting of all was the Decennial Award for an outstanding contribution to digital preservation. I couldn't be more happy to see my ex-colleagues at the Archaeology Data Service pick up this most prestigious of awards. The award was a great honour given the exceptionally high standard of the other candidates nominated in this category. An impressive accolade awarded for the ADS's excellent track record of research and innovation in digital preservation over the last ten years and it's innovative business model. I am very pleased to be able to say that I was a part of this.

Congratulations also go to the excellent PLANETS project which won the award for Research and Innovation.

A big thank-you to William and Carol at the DPC and our hosts at the Wellcome Collection for making the event a night to remember.

Jenny Mitcham, Digital Archivist

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