Nominations Now Open for the 2014 NDSA Innovation Awards

by Trevor Owens

The National Digital Stewardship Alliance Innovation Working Group is proud to open the nominations for the 2014 NDSA Innovation Awards. As a diverse membership group with a shared commitment to digital preservation, the NDSA understands the importance of innovation and risk-taking in developing and supporting a broad range of successful digital preservation activities. These awards are an example of the NDSA’s commitment to encourage and recognize innovation in the digital stewardship community.

This slate of annual awards highlights and commends creative individuals, projects, organizations and future stewards demonstrating originality and excellence in their contributions to the field of digital preservation. The program is administered by a committee drawn from members of the NDSA Innovation Working Group.

Last year’s winners are exemplars of the diversity and collaboration essential to supporting the digital stewardship community as it works to preserve and make available digital materials. For more information on the details of last year’s recipients, please see the blog post announcing last year’s winners.

The NDSA Innovation Awards focus on recognizing excellence in one or more of the following areas:

• Individuals making a significant, innovative contribution to the field of digital preservation;
• Projects whose goals or outcomes represent an inventive, meaningful addition to the understanding or processes required for successful, sustainable digital preservation stewardship;
• Organizations taking an innovative approach to providing support and guidance to the digital preservation community;
• Future stewards, especially students, but including educators, trainers or curricular endeavors, taking a creative approach to advancing knowledge of digital preservation theory and practices.

Acknowledging that innovative digital stewardship can take many forms, eligibility for these awards has been left purposely broad. Nominations are open to anyone or anything that falls into the above categories and any entity can be nominated for one of the four awards. Nominees should be US-based people and projects or collaborative international projects that contain a US-based partner. This is your chance to help us highlight and reward novel, risk-taking and inventive approaches to the challenges of digital preservation.

Nominations are now being accepted and you can submit a nomination using this quick, easy online submission form. You can also submit a nomination by emailing a brief description, justification and the URL and/or contact information of your nominee to ndsa (at) loc.gov.

Nominations will be accepted until Friday May 2, 2014 and winners announced in mid-May. The prizes will be plaques presented to the winners at the Digital Preservation 2014 meeting taking place in the Washington, DC area on July 22-24, 2014. Winners will be asked to deliver a very brief talk about their activities as part of the awards ceremony and travel funds are expected to be available for these invited presenters.

Help us recognize and reward innovation in digital stewardship and submit a nomination!