Tyler Walters receives national award for digital preservation efforts

The National Digital Stewardship Alliance awarded Tyler Walters, dean and professor of University Libraries, its 2025 Individual Excellence Award for his significant contributions to the field of digital preservation.

The alliance established the Excellence Awards program to recognize and encourage exemplary work in digital stewardship. Walters’ selection in the individual category reflects his contributions to building systems, policies, and partnerships that strengthen digital preservation practices.

Walters has worked on digital preservation initiatives throughout his career, and his leadership has contributed to the creation and success of several organizations that address the challenges of digital stewardship. 

Walters helped create the National Digital Stewardship Alliance in 2010 as an initiative of the Library of Congress’s National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program and served as its first steering committee chair. Through the program, he became co-founder of the MetaArchive Cooperative, a distributed digital preservation network, and the Educopia Institute, which initially hosted the MetaArchive.  

Walters has served on the boards of several significant digital stewardship organizations. He is the current board chair of Academic Preservation Trust, a consortium of institutions that provides a preservation repository for digital content. His professional service also includes chairing the board of DuraSpace, which hosts open-source communities and software initiatives. He participated in leading DuraSpace’s merger with LYRASIS, a provider of technologies, services, and content to libraries and other cultural institutions. Walters was also instrumental in bringing the International Conference on Open Repositories to the United States and continued to guide this community by serving on the steering committee for four years.

For over three decades, Walters has published and presented internationally on digital stewardship topics, including trust in collaborative digital preservation federations, inter-institutional cooperation, research data curation, and institutional repositories. Walters was awarded the Ernst Posner award for best article in the American Archivist, was the lead author for the Association of Research Libraries’ publication “Digital Curation for Preservation,” and is an editorial board member of the International Journal of Digital Curation.

He has had success in grant-funded digital stewardship projects, totaling more than $8 million from the Institute of Museum and Library Services, the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program, the National Archives and Records Administration, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. 

In addition to his success in organizational leadership, research, publishing, and grant writing, Walters has shared his knowledge and expertise in the classroom by teaching courses on digitization, digital preservation, and digital asset management for the University of Arizona College of Information Science and San Jose State University School of Information. He has also served as a consultant for the Library of Congress’s American Folklife Center and the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame on digital preservation planning and readiness.

At Virginia Tech, he has overseen the development of several platforms and services, including the university’s institutional repository, VTechWorks, the research data repository, the Southwest Virginia Digital Archive, and Special Collections and University Archives Online. More recently, University Libraries developed the Virginia Tech Digital Library Platform. This cloud-based system integrates with networks such as the Academic Preservation Trust to manage and provide access to digital collections. These collections include research data, digitized library materials, digital humanities projects, and emerging forms of content, including 3D models and virtual reality environments.

“It’s important to preserve and steward content, either born digital or converted from physical items, so that it is available for research and study for years to come,” said Walters. “I am honored to be recognized for the work I’ve done in this area throughout my career and am pleased to continue to build on knowledge and innovation in digital stewardship at University Libraries at Virginia Tech.”

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