ARCHIVER Awarded for Collaboration and Cooperation by the Digital Preservation Coalition

On 12th September 2022, the ARCHIVER project has been awarded the Award for Collaboration and Cooperation by the Digital Preservation Coalition

The announcement was done during the ceremony of the prestigious Digital Preservation Awards at the iPres 2022 conference, held in Glasgow, UK. The Digital Preservation Awards  are the most prominent celebration of achievement for those people and organisations who have made significant contributions towards a sustainable future for our digital assets.

ARCHIVER was announced finalist for the Award for Collaboration and Cooperation in June 2022. The Award celebrates significant collaboration across institutional, professional, sectoral and geographical boundaries which have had a demonstrable and positive impact on digital preservation.

"On behalf of CERN and the ARCHIVER partners, I would to thank the DPC and the Preservation community for this moment and great recognition. It has been a long journey that started back in 2019 (since then the world changed just a little bit...) And yes ARCHIVER indeed embodies the spirit of what Collaboration and Cooperation means i) Across different domains of science, ii) Across different regions in Europe and UK, iii) And of course between the public and the private sector with SME producing competitively high quality software and services designed for Big Science that will certainly commoditise the benefits of digital preservation across. There is a "before ARCHIVER" and "after ARCHIVER" for LTDP in science.

Thank you very much to the EC and all that contributed to this effort and let's now build what comes next on it!"

João Fernandes, ARCHIVER Coordinator

Watch the interview of the winners recorded by the Digital Preservation Awards Committee

From the Award report

• This project involves active collaboration between the scientific community and the private sector (digital preservation service providers)
• Demonstrates a type of collaboration which will be very important for the digital preservation community
• Important work in public-private partnership to level the playing field for long-term digital preservation of research data.
• An interesting project meeting a clear need
• No end of hazards in this creative project. Well done.
• This project involved a diverse group of stakeholders to ensure the preservation of scientific data
• This is the right project at the right time in terms of outputs and tools, but it’s also encouraging to see the different parts of the consortium bringing different skills and capabilities. That’s a lot rarer than you might expect in large programs like this, and its one of the significant reasons for its success.
• Such a complicated set of requirements is very daunting. We can only imagine how demanding project leadership has been: but one gets the impression from the outside that the partners enjoy working with each other. We don’t celebrate effective management enough and it’s time we did. Through some invisible process the whole has become greater than the partners individually.

Watch the recording of the Presentation Ceremony during the Digital Preservation Awards 2022

From the Award application

The work accomplished in ARCHIVER is a game-changer for the approach taken to long-term research data management both from a mindset and technological perspective, i.e. what data do researchers retain, how to keep intellectual control of it and what data stewards must do to ensure long-term value can be realised from it. The social importance and economic benefits of making scientific data open and reusable according to FAIR principles (Findable Accessible Interoperable Reusable) have already been demonstrated. However, there are still major gaps when it comes to the sustainability of long-term accessibility and usability of research data, for example as discussed in the FAIR Forever report from the Digital Preservation Coalition DPC).

These gaps put data at long-term risk, they prevent the construction and operation of sustainable Trusted Digital Repositories services, and they affect organizations both large and small who are tasked with being custodians of valuable research artefacts.

The ARCHIVER selected companies are promoting solutions that are environmentally sustainable, providing the means to analyse and reduce the carbon footprint as an aid towards carbon neutrality. As service providers, the consortia led by Arkivum and Libnova can support a range of organizations to take steps to respond to this urgent global challenge, aligning the innovative R&D produced with initiatives such as the Code of Conduct for Data Centres and the more recent Green Public Procurement criteria part of the Green Deal.

These are the aspects the ARCHIVER project has set out to solve by selecting these European SME companies with expertise in open data, archiving and data preservation to develop innovative solutions.

Watch the video prepared for the iPRES conference 2022