BnL Elected Jury Member for Digital Preservation Awards 2020

Roxana Maurer, head of digital preservation at the National Library of Luxembourg (more widely known by its French abbreviation, BnL), has just been elected to the jury of the Digital Preservation Awards 2020.

Since 2004, the Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC) has coordinated the prestigious Digital Preservation Awards, which recognise organisations or individuals who have contributed with innovative projects to the sustainability of digital content. Among the many winners have been University of Stanford Libraries, Amsterdam Museum, University College London, University of Glasgow, Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg and Premis Working Group.

This year, the awards ceremony will take place online on Thursday 5 November 2020, on the occasion of World Digital Preservation Day.

The DPC is a non-profit organisation committed to digital preservation and helping its members to guarantee long-term access to digital resources. It takes on the role of guide, cooperative platform and information relay for professionals. In November 2018, the BnL became the seventh national library to join the coalition. Since then, it has been represented by Roxana Maurer, head of digital preservation at the BnL, who has also been a member of the Executive Board of the DPC since February 2019. The coalition is now an integral part of an international network of high-level experts in the archiving of digital content.

"As a member of the DPC, the BnL takes advantage of the expertise of the Coalition to train its staff, to further develop our Digital Preservation Strategy and to work together with other institutions on common challenges," explained Roxana Maurer.

The BnL has set up a shared long-term preservation platform, in cooperation with the Government IT Centre, the Luxembourg National Archives and the Centre national de l'audiovisuel (CNA). The BnL manages, makes available and stores digital publications online, resulting from a digitalisation process or digital legal deposit (electronic books, digital newspapers, websites, etc.).

Recently, the BnL implemented a system of perennial identifiers, based on the ARK (Archival Resource Key) format. The ARKs make it possible to identify resources of all types in the long term: digital documents and objects, scientific publications, genealogical documents, museum objects and educational resources. Thanks to the ARK format, a publication published in 2020 and saved in the BnL's long-term digital preservation system, will remain searchable and available for consultation in 2040, with the same URL, even if the original digital platforms and media have changed or ceased to exist in the meantime.