Alumna Anna Oates won the National Records of Scotland Award for the Most Outstanding Student Work in Digital Preservation for her master’s thesis work on the PDF/A standard. She received the award Nov. 29 at a ceremony at the Amsterdam Museum as part of an international conference hosted by the Dutch Digital Heritage Network and the Amsterdam Museum on World Digital Preservation Day. Oates received her master's degree in 2018 from the School of Information Sciences.
Oates’ work originated from her research as a student in the Oxford-Illinois Digital Library Placement Program. In her summer 2017 placement, she spent six weeks at Oxford’s Bodleian Libraries. Her project focused on student theses in Oxford’s Institutional Repository and the challenges faced in meeting the ISO 19005 Standard, which specifies how to use the Portable Document Format for long-term preservation of electronic documents. When she returned from England, Oates extended her research project into a master’s thesis and submitted the abstract to and presented at iConference.
Oates is employed as a scholarly communication and discovery services librarian for the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. More information is available online.
