Karyn Williamson is a Digital Preservation Analyst at the Digital Preservation Coalition.
As some of you may already know, The National Archives UK has recently opened applications for a newly expanded Archives Revealed grant program.
Although it has existed for a while, it has been significantly expanded with a new partnership between the National Archives, the National Lottery Heritage Fund, the Pilgrim Trust and the Wolfson Foundation. The program is dedicated to ‘unlocking archival collections’, making them accessible to researchers and the public. There are three distinct kinds of grants to meet different needs: Scoping Grants, Cataloguing Grants, and Consortium Grants.
It’s an exciting development for the sector and colleagues at the National Archives are rightly to be congratulated for bringing it together.
How Can DPC Help?
We are keen to encourage archive services that want to assess and open up their collections, and we want to help them promote the unique records they contain. We can therefore give support to applicants, whether with informal advice about digital preservation at the application stage or as a funded partner in the delivery of the project.
There’s already a range of supporting materials on the DPC website - guidance notes and assessment frameworks that are likely to be relevant.
We’re also ready to help members and non-members alike that might be thinking of applying for a grant. DPC has a very diverse network, so we’re well placed to introduce prospective partners, building consortia of specialist skills and insights to strengthen proposals.
A Collaborative Approach
Alison Diamond from Argyll Estates recently worked with us on a resilience grant application. She shared her experience:
"The DPC has been really helpful with our application to the TNA Resilience fund. Karyn has been generous with her time, talking through what we need to do to develop digital preservation, providing her thoughts on improving our application, providing written support for our application and will be ready to assist us if and when we are able to start on the digital preservation journey."
So, if you are interested in support for an Archives Revealed application, please drop me a line at karyn.williamson@dpconline.org.