Libraries abroad: Library of Congress Project wins “Digital Preservation Award 2010”

The Memento Project led by researchers at Los Alamos National Laboratory and Old Dominion University, has won the Digital Preservation Award 2010. The award, given by the Institute for Conservation and the Digital Preservation Coalition and supported by Sir Paul McCartney, celebrates the highest standards worldwide in the field of digital preservation.

Information on the web is dynamic, changing every day or even every few seconds. When users visit a site, they are automatically shown the most recent content version. There is no uniform, simple way to find older information. Memento proposes a technical framework aimed at better integrating the current and the past web. The project has a solution that lets users enable a "time-travel" mode to find content that is date-and-time specific.

In other words, Memento can allow users to see what was formerly on the Internet, such as during disasters, national elections or at any other point before the current moment.

"Winning the Digital Preservation Award is a big achievement," said William Kilbride, Executive Director of the Digital Preservation Coalition. "It is the only prize in this area that considers projects from every part of the world and that uses an expert panel of judges to pick the best one. The Library of Congress deserves recognition for supporting Memento along with many other innovative projects devoted to digital preservation and access."