2024 Neil Beagrie

 Neil is a Commissioner (trustee/non-exec) at the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Wales (RCAHMW); Chair of the RSA Fellowship Council, a RSA Trustee, and a life fellow of the Royal Society for Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA); and charity trustee at the Turn End Trust. As Director of Consultancy at Charles Beagrie Limited he had an international reputation as a consultant across the science and research data, digital archive and digital library sectors. His career achievements include founding and growing the Digital Preservation Coalition as a not-for profit membership organisation and starting the Digital Preservation Handbook as an online guide. He has also been a key figure internationally in creating the business case for investment in public research data infrastructure.

In London on November 22, 2024

Each year the Emmett Leahy Award recognises an individual whose contributions and accomplishments have had a major impact on the records and information management profession. The award was established in 1967 to honour the spirit of innovation, dedication, and excellence in records and information management demonstrated by Emmett Leahy, who pioneered the development of the lifecycle approach to managing records and information in the US Government. In choosing the awardee, the Emmett Leahy Committee looks for evidence of high-quality original concepts, approaches or methodologies and their impact on programme development and management, innovation, education, and professional and organisational leadership.

Neil Beagrie has made significant and long-lasting contributions within the UK and internationally to preserving, managing and sustaining access to our digital heritage and research data. Neil’s career has been characterised not only by his expertise and insights, but also by a strong and consistent commitment to collaboration and partnership, and to creating the conditions for the digital preservation community to advance, whether at an organisational level or through initiatives of national and international scope. 

After graduating in Archaeology from Durham University, he began his professional career at the Royal Commission on the Historical Monuments of England where he became Head of Archaeological Archives. Since then, his career in the public and private sectors has been focussed on strategies for digital preservation, access to digital information in archives, libraries and data centres, and studies of their value and economic impact. He has held a range of senior information management roles including BL/JISC Partnership Manager at the British Library, Programme Director at the UK Joint Information Systems Committee, and Director and Assistant Director of the Arts and Humanities Data Service. For 20 years he served as director at Charles Beagrie Ltd, the consultancy company he co-founded, working with a wide range of clients in the UK and internationally on subjects including cost-benefit analysis, project to service transitions, strategy and policy development, research data management and digital preservation. 

Neil was the international consultant to the US National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program (NDIIPP), and has been Principal Investigator for the Digital Lives and Keeping Research Data Safe (KRDS) research projects, and for the Digital Preservation Coalition’s Technology Watch Report series. He chaired the UK government Office for Science and Innovation digital preservation and curation e-infrastructure sub-group and wrote its influential report published in 2007, and co-authored a series of ground-breaking value and impact studies for research data infrastructure between 2011 and 2021. Neil has played a major role in developing strategies for digital preservation including founding the Digital Preservation Coalition and overseeing development of the UK Digital Curation Centre. The DPC has gone on to become a major international force for advocacy, community building and knowledge sharing, while the DCC is a world-leading centre of expertise in the curation of digital information. Neil also conceived, managed and co-authored the first two editions of the Digital Preservation Handbook, an award-winning, hugely influential and still heavily consulted resource for archivists and information managers.

Collectively, Neil’s career represents a remarkable track record of sustained, tangible impact to the benefit of the digital preservation and research data communities.

In 2014 Neil was awarded the Archival Technology Medal by the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers in Los Angeles in recognition of his long-term contributions to the research and implementation of strategies and solutions for digital preservation. Neil was appointed a Commissioner of the Royal Commission on the Historical Monuments of Wales in 2017. In 2022 he was awarded a Digital Preservation Coalition Fellowship, recognizing his substantial, generous and distinguished contribution to securing our digital legacy.

For his services to the preservation of our digital heritage, Neil Beagrie is the recipient of the 2024 Emmett Leahy Award.

Emmett Leahy Award 2024 – Neil Beagrie Statement 

It was a tremendous surprise to be nominated for this award and I would like to thank the Emmett Leahy Award Committee for this honour and the company Preservica for sponsoring it. I feel both privileged and humbled to have been able to accept the award at a lunch with former colleagues who have worked with me over several decades prior to my retirement last year.

To put my career in context, from a very early age I was captivated by archaeology. I was very fortunate to be involved very early on in the emerging fields of digital preservation and research data management with exciting, complex challenges and to collaborate with very talented colleagues across archives, information management and other professions. That issue of collaboration will be a key thread in what I have to say.

Digital preservation and information management are highly collaborative. I feel I have done my best work over my career in partnership with others and some of my greatest impacts on the records and information profession come from the longevity of the collaborations I have been involved in. 

Of course, collaboration between organisations and individuals is not always easy – there are often forces of competition in play and give and take is required. However, I strongly believe that there are compelling reasons (such as the ever-increasing scale of digital information, diverse media, and pace of technical innovations) for collaboration to be at the heart of what we do in addressing the digital challenges facing the profession. 

In the earliest stage of my career as a Curator then Head of Archaeological Archive at the Royal Commission on the Historical Monuments of England (RCHME), I was lucky to be involved in the early development of informatics and computerisation of records in archaeology. The collaborations underpinning that early work provided the foundations for information standards and information retrieval for heritage records in the UK that are still influential today.

At RCHME I had been responsible for both analogue and digital records but with a move to the Arts and Humanities Data Service (AHDS) in 1997, I became responsible solely for digital collections. That exclusive focus on digital persisted for the rest of my career. As an Assistant Director of the AHDS, I was part of the Executive and of the distributed national research data services for Archaeology, History, Performing Arts, Texts, and Visual Arts for UK universities. The AHDS was a ground-breaking data archive for the Humanities. Although funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council for the AHDS ceased in 2008, it has had a major ongoing influence on research data management and data archives in the UK and internationally, through the Archaeology Data Service (a component service developed by the AHDS) and through evolving data management practice at the UK Data Archive (the host for the History Data Service). Both are still active and very influential in terms of data management and digital archiving. Whilst at AHDS I also developed and co-published with Dan Greenstein ‘A Strategic Framework for Creating and Preserving Digital Resources’. As far as we are aware, it presented the first advocacy of a lifecycle approach to digital preservation. 

This early work at AHDS was the stepping stone into digital preservation and a move to the Joint Information Systems Committee for UK Universities (JISC). In 2000 JISC appointed me to establish and develop a proposed Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC) over a two-year period. Widening collaboration across sectors and between institutions such as data archives, libraries and archives had been seen as a key requirement to address digital preservation challenges at a national level. I was to be responsible for founding the core elements of the Coalition including its initial membership structure, legal entity, business, advocacy and work-force development plans. Lynne Brindley ably chaired the DPC’s first board. The DPC was launched formally in 2002. The DPC has continued to grow and expand on these early foundations, particularly over the last decade and under the leadership of its current director William Kilbride. Today the DPC has a membership of some 170 organisations and continues to have a major influence on the records and information management profession. 

In addition, at JISC I was tasked with developing and managing the JISC Strategy for Continuing Access and Preservation of Digital Materials and its implementation plan. It was both an advocacy document supporting a funding bid for the implementation plan and a road map for future work. A strong emphasis was placed within the Strategy on records management. I was fortunate to recruit Steve Bailey to be the JISC Electronic Records Manager to lead this work. The Strategy also helped establish the Digital Curation Centre. JISC was a dynamic and innovative organisation and I benefited immensely from working with colleagues such as Reg Carr, Rachel Bruce, Alicia Wise and Neil Grindley amongst others whilst I was there.

Another key development at this time was a joint effort to compile a Preservation Management of Digital Materials Handbook. I was principal investigator for the first edition. I conceived and managed the work, whilst co-authoring the publication with Maggie Jones the researcher for the project. Collaboration and pooling complementary knowledge and experience was essential to successfully completing that work. Maggie went on to play an important role as the first full-time employee of the DPC. I also developed a parallel digital edition (the Digital Preservation Handbook) in 2002 as an “endowment” resource for the new Digital Preservation Coalition. The Handbook was the first attempt to synthesise the diverse and burgeoning sources of advice on and practice for digital preservation. Later I was also managing editor on behalf of the DPC for the 2nd edition of the Handbook, which was awarded the Innovation of the Year Award 2017 by the Information and Records Management Society. Many individuals and organisations contributed to the 2nd edition through book sprints, peer review, project and advisory boards.  After more than two decades of use, the Handbook remains a major resource for archivists and information managers available on open access and has been translated into three other languages (Chinese, French and Italian). 

In 2004 I moved to the British Library to take responsibility for the BL/JISC partnership: identifying, starting-up, and supporting digital projects of mutual benefit to the British Library, JISC, and UK Higher Education sector. Amongst many projects, I was Principal Investigator for the Digital Lives research project on personal digital archives funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council involving the British Library and UCL. My articles and presentations on this theme represented a thought piece and call to arms to focus more on the collection and preservation of personal digital archives. Broader issues for the public are still surfacing: there has been growing publicity around digital legacy issues for social media and even guidance from the Law Society in the UK on digital legacy and executors.

In this British Library role, I also chaired the UK Office for Science and Innovation digital preservation and curation e-infrastructure sub-group and wrote its report published in 2007. A key challenge I found at the time was a lack of data on (and methodologies for) cost/benefits of research data archives and services which we could use to advocate to Government for increased investment. 

Rectifying this situation was a key focus for me over the next two decades as I moved into consultancy. I formed, with my wife Daphne Charles, Charles Beagrie Ltd an independent consultancy company specialising in the science and research data, digital library and digital archive sectors.  Between 2008-2010 I led the teams in the three phases of the Keeping Research Data Safe (KRDS) research projects that defined a Cost Model and a Benefits Framework/Toolkit for long-term curation/digital preservation of research data. Key contributions for this work came from myself, Julia Chruszcz, Brian Lavoie and Matthew Woollard and a range of participating data services. Subsequently between 2011-2021, I managed and co-authored with Prof John Houghton five ground-breaking value and impact studies of research data infrastructures. Our impact and value reports of the EMBL European Bioinformatics Institute in 2016 and 2021 underpinned successful evaluations and infrastructure funding applications of £125 million. The overall impact of the work on costs, value, and impact studies can be seen in its influence on the policy documents of major funders and professional organisations.

As a consultant, my association continued with digital preservation on behalf of many organisations in the sector. I was Principal Investigator and managing editor for the new series of Digital Preservation Coalition Technology Watch Reports between 2012 and 2016. The new series launched publicly in February 2012 with Preserving Email by Chris Prom and included 13 further titles.

Consultancy led to new collaborations with associates, partners and clients. The size and mix of the consultancy team flexed according to the client’s needs and timescales. Some of the main partner companies in joint projects were Digital Archiving Consultancy (Philip Lord and Alison MacDonald), Giaretta Associates (David and Krystina Giaretta), Globale Informationstechnik (Matthias Hemmje) and Research Consulting (Rob Johnson). 

Last year I retired from consultancy and I have focussed my interests on a small number of charity trustee and non-executive directorships. Looking back over my career, I feel privileged to have worked with world-leading practitioners and organisations in many sectors. I would like to thank them all for the inspiration and support they have given me over a long and immensely fulfilling working life. I believe similar collaborations and partnerships will be central to the success of the next generation of information and record professionals.