The Netwerk Digitaal Erfgoed Award for Teaching & Communications

Nominees: Amber Cushing, Lena Böse, Feargal Keenan, Ellen Fanning at University College Dublin

For the Digital Curation: Core Concepts module at University College Dublin, postgraduate students complete a “game” assignment consisting of 3 deliverables:

• A presentation (Dragons Den style pitch) in which they enthusiastically share the central idea behind the game they designed to communicate/teach/explain one or more concepts central to digital preservation.

• A 3 page description of the game describing the rules of play, objective, central components of digital preservation that the game is meant to target.

• A 1 page Ad summarizing the game, designed to generate excitement. 

Bose, Fanning & Keenan creatively used the concept of Dungeons & Dragons to structure the process of digital preservation as a journey.

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Nominee: CLOCKSS

Did you know that 25% of academic journals are known to be at risk? For academic books, the figure is higher but no one knows precisely how high. Key to changing this is to engage book publishers, academic libraries, and researchers and CLOCKSS convened a working group in 2023 to do just this. The group produced a guide on digital preservation and has launched an education campaign within and through key publishing trade associations. The group has also been instrumental in preparing an ISO draft standard for the preservation of digital books in EPUB format. The group is now delivering a proof of concept project by which publishers, digital archives, and libraries can use ONIX metadata to track what has been published and what is preserved.

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Nominees: Susanne van den Eijkel and Lotte Wijsman, Nationaal Archief (Netherlands) and Francesca Mackenzie, The National Archives (UK)

Bits and Bots is a study group teaching digital archivists coding skills, currently focussing on Python and front-end development. The group is open to all and everyone, including the organisers, are learning together as a community instead of in isolation. Digital skills are increasingly important to digital preservation and it is not surprising that “Computer Programming” is listed as one of the skill elements in the Digital Preservation Coalition’s Framework. Coding can be daunting, Bits and Bots tackles this challenge, making learning fun by teaching coding through the creation of games. The community consists of 47 members from 5 continents.

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