Announcing the 2016 NDSA Award Winners

We are delighted to announce the recipients of the National Digital Stewardship Alliance’s (NDSA) annual Innovation Awards!

This year, the NDSA annual innovation awards committee reviewed eighteen exceptional nominations from across the country. These awards highlight and commend creative individuals, projects, organizations, and future stewards demonstrating originality and excellence in their contributions to the field of digital preservation.

The awardees will be recognized publicly during NDSA’s Digital Preservation 2016 at the reception held the evening of Wednesday, November 9. Please join us in congratulating them for their hard work! Each of the winners will be interviewed later this year, so stay tuned to learn more about their work on our blog.


Individual Awards

Jarrett DrakeJarrett M. Drake is the Digital Archivist at Princeton University’s Seeley G. Mudd Manuscript Library, where his primary responsibilities entail managing the Digital Curation Program, describing born-digital archival collections for the Princeton University Archives, and coordinating the Archiving Student Activism at Princeton (ASAP) initiative. He is also one of the organizers and an advisory archivist of A People’s Archive of Police Violence in Cleveland, an independent community-based archive in Cleveland, Ohio, USA, that collects, preserves, and provide access to the stories, memories, and accounts of police violence as experienced or observed by Cleveland citizens. Jarrett serves on the advisory board of the StoryCorps Justice Project and Documenting the Now: Supporting Scholarly Use and Preservation of Social Media Content.

Jarrett is recognized for his work at Princeton and in the community to challenge and re-examine the practices of archiving and documenting history, particularly relating to preserving the underrepresented voices in history.

Dave RiceDave Rice is an audiovisual archivist and technologist whose work focuses on independent media, open source technical in preservation applications, and quality control analytics. He has worked as an archivist or archival consultant at media organizations like CUNY, Democracy Now, the United Nations, WITNESS, Downtown Community Television, and Bay Area Video Coalition. He is a graduate of the L. Jeffrey Selznick School of Film Preservation.

Dave is recognized for his work in advocating widely for standards and collaboration across countries and organizations as well as his work with nonprofit organizations such as Democracy Now and WITNESS.

Organization Award

The Mid-Michigan Digital Practitioners (MMDP) group is a regional collective of librarians, archivists, museum curators, conservators, historians, scholars and more engaged in creating and curating digital collections in Mid-Michigan and the surrounding region. The mission of the group is to provide an open and local forum for conversation, collaboration and networking for professionals working with digital collections in Michigan.

The MMDP is recognized for its highly original and successful organizational model in fostering innovation sharing and knowledge exchange.

Project Award

2016-2017 Cohort ClassThe Tribal Stewardship Cohort Program: Digital Heritage Management, Archiving and Mukurtu CMS Training project is a three year program targeting the unique needs of Tribal archives, libraries and museums through a cohort-based educational model emphasizing digitization and preservation of materials in culturally responsive ways. Their goal is to provide long-term educational opportunities in digital heritage management and preservation with an emphasis on flexible models and cohort-specific needs.

The project is recognized for its work in providing long-term educational opportunities in digital heritage management and preservation as well as its dedication to culturally responsive and ethically-minded practices. Kim Christen, the Director of the Tribal Stewardship Cohort Program, will accept this award on behalf of the project.

Future Steward Award

Samantha AbramsSamantha Abrams recently moved from Madison, Wisconsin, to Brooklyn, New York, where she works as the Community Archivist at StoryCorps. She is interested in web and personal archiving, digital preservation, community archives, and digital literacy. At the Madison Public Library, Samantha took the initiative to work with library staff to create its Personal Archiving Lab. The lab provides public access to equipment and instruction that allows for digitization of photos, audio and film formats in a controlled, safe and professional environment.

Samantha is recognized for her work with the Madison Public Library and its Personal Archiving Lab as well as her initiative to create innovative projects and classes.


The annual Innovation Awards were established by the NDSA to recognize and encourage innovation in the field of digital preservation stewardship. The program is administered by a committee drawn from members of the NDSA Innovation Working Group. Learn more about the 2012, 2013, 2014, and 2015 Award recipients.

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