Liz Forgan OBE, Chair of the Judging Panel
Chair of the National Heritage Memorial Fund and Heritage Lottery Fund since 2001, Liz Forgan chaired the Awards judges in 2004. She was formerly Managing Director of BBC Radio. Following an early career in journalism, she moved to television with the start of Channel 4, where she became Director of Programmes. She joined the BBC in 1993.  She is a former Chair of the Churches Conservation Trust and also former Trustee of the Phoenix Trust. She is the Chair of the Scott Trust and a board member of the Conservatoire for Dance and Drama.

Dan Cruickshank
A regular presenter on the BBC, Dan Cruickshank is best known for his popular series Britain 's Best Buildings, Around the World in 80 Treasures and for his appearances in The House Detectives and What the Industrial Revolution Did For Us . He is a leading expert on architecture and historic buildings, and a frequent contributor to The Architects' Journal and The Architectural Review . He is the author and editor of numerous books. He is an Honorary Fellow of RIBA with a BA in Art, Design and Architecture, and for three years was also a visiting professor in the Department of Architecture at the University of Sheffield . He is an active member of the Georgian Group and a member of the Architectural Panel of the National Trust.

George Ferguson
President of the Royal Institute of British Architects (until end-August 2005) and Director, Acanthus Ferguson Mann Architects. George Ferguson built up his Bristol-based architectural practice in the 1970s and founded the national group of practices, Acanthus, in 1986. He writes and broadcasts extensively on environmental and architectural matters. He set up the Tobacco Factory arts centre in Bristol , which has been a catalyst for the regeneration of the area. He holds honorary degrees from Bristol University and the University of Wales .

Sir Simon Jenkins
Author and columnist. Former editor of both the London Evening Standard and The Times, Simon Jenkins has also published books on politics and on the history and architecture of London . He was deputy chairman of English Heritage 1985-90 and chairman of the Independent Commission on Local Democracy 1994-5. He is a member of the Buildings Books Trust and chaired the Booker Prize in 2000. His latest book, England's Thousand Best Houses , was published in October 2003.

Maev Kennedy
Journalist and broadcaster. Maev Kennedy is Arts and Heritage Correspondent of The Guardian. She has written on arts, archaeology and cultural issues for a wide range of publications in Ireland and Britain and is the author of Hamlyn History of Archaeology .

Gillian Lewis
Gillian Lewis has been involved in preservation of the heritage sector since the 1960s. She has led exhibition, fundraising and conference projects in local, university and national museums and has assisted government organisations in gallery education and conservation issues. She directed conservation and registration at the National Maritime Museum , setting up programmes for diverse collections of artefacts.She has served on the board of UKIC and ICOM UK , the Council for the Care of Churches, the Leather Conservation Centre, the Dulwich Picture Gallery and Cathedral Camps. She is a trustee of several education and conservation trusts and adviser to two cathedrals.

Georgina Nayler
Director of the Pilgrim Trust. Georgina Nayler was Director of the National Heritage Memorial Fund from 1989-95 before moving to the Pilgrim Trust in 1996. She was a member of the Historic Buildings Council for Scotland from 1990-96 and is a Trustee of the Alexander Greek Thomson Trust (Glasgow) and a member of the Advisory Board to the Faculty of Arts at the University of Warwick .

Alice Rawsthorn
Director of London 's Design Museum . Before joining the Design Museum in 2001, Alice Rawsthorn was an award-winning journalist with the Financial Time s. She is the author of a biography of the fashion designer Yves Saint Laurent. A regular broadcaster, she is a Trustee of the Whitechapel Art Gallery in London, chair of the British Council's Design Advisory Group, a member of the British Council's Visual Arts Group and its Arts Advisory Committee and the lead advisor on the visual arts to the Arts Council of England.

Richard Boulderstone, Chair of the Judging Panel
Director of e-Strategy, at the British Library. This role involves the management and further development of e and IT strategy throughout the British Library, the implementation of digital media projects and services, and the delivery of e-business methods and tools. Major developments to be led by him include the digitisation of many of the Library's collections as well as the archiving of materials that are 'born digital'. Working in close collaboration with the rest of the British Library's executive team, Mr Boulderstone will ensure the implementation of a fully integrated e-programme across all Directorates - adding the essential e-ingredient to the British Library's strategy to remain relevant and innovative. Prior to this appointment, Richard has held senior positions in a number of international information providers, working both in the UK and US. Between 1984 and 1993 he worked at Knight-Ridder Financial where he was Senior Vice President responsible for Technology. Subsequently he worked at Reed Elsevier plc and Thomson Financial before spending two years as Senior Vice President Engineering at Looksmart Ltd, the world's largest search and web directory business.

Sheila Anderson
Director of the Arts and Humanities Data Service (AHDS). The AHDS acquires, curates, preserves and provides access to complex digital resources created by or supporting research and teaching in Higher and Further Education and life-long learning. The AHDS has recently established an OAIS compliant preservation repository along with a range of policy documents and preservation handbooks that describe the AHDS approach to preserving electronic texts, databases, still images, moving image, audio, GIS data, geophysics data, virtual reality materials and other digital formats. Sheila has also undertaken a number of preservation consultancies and projects, including most recently a report for JISC on the preservation of E-prints, and a project to develop a distributed model for the preservation of institutional repository content. She speaks frequently on matters of digital curation, preservation and access, and the creation of digital resources to standards that allow for long-term access and preservation, and has contributed to training courses, workshops and seminars in this area.

Kevin Ashley
Head of Digital Archives Department, University of London Computer Centre. For the past ten years, Kevin's group has worked on the preservation of digital resources on behalf of other organisations. In many cases this has included providing descriptions of those resources and managing access to them. Most of these resources are archival, whether born digital or as digital surrogates, and have involved many types of information (databases, text, video and audio) with different access patterns and cataloguing requirements. Kevin represents ULCC on the board of the Digital Preservation Coalition, was a member of the Advisory Council for Erpanet and is part of the RLG-NARA task force seeking to develop an audit and certification mechanism for trusted digital repositories. He speaks frequently on matters related to digital preservation and management of digital content and has contributed to training through the Society of Archivists and the DPC, as well as other organisations.

David Dawson
Head of the Digital Futures Team of the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council (MLA). David studied Archaeology at Durham University, and completed the Museum Studies Course at Leicester in 1985, and later becoming an Associate of the Museums Association in 1988. His first post in a museum was working on a documentation project, completing cards for the archaeology collections of the Museum of Sussex Archaeology. In 1998 David joined the Museums & Galleries Commission as New Technology Adviser, before becoming Senior ICT Adviser. He managed the DCMS/MLA IT Challenge Fund, and is currently working on a range of other projects and strategic developments. He represents MLA on many different Groups and initiatives including: UK Co-ordinator of the EU Digitising Content Together initiative - an e-Europe action; Expert adviser to the New Opportunities Fund on the nof-digitise programme; Adviser to DCMS on the development of Culture Online. David works with mda and the 24 Hour Museum and is also a member of various committees, including UKOLN Interoperability Focus, Metadata for Education, Archaeology Data Service, HEIRNet. He has contributed to a number of strategic developments, including JISC, Office of e-Envoy Broadband Research Group, TASI, and NAACE.

Hans Jansen
Head of the Research & Development Division of the Koninklijke Bibliotheek (KB), the national library of the Netherlands. Hans has been involved in numerous national and international projects in the library field. He directed Dutch national programs for preservation (Metamorfoze) and digitisation (Memory of the Netherlands). In his present position he is also responsible for the research and development into methods and techniques for the long-term preservation of and permanent access to digital objects stored in the so-called e-Depot, a system jointly developed by the KB and IBM and operational since October 2003. The e-Depot also functions as a safe place for scientific journals of major STM-publishers.

Maggie Jones
Executive Secretary of the Digital Preservation Coalition, sponsor of the Digital Preservation Award. The DPC undertakes a range of activities aimed at raising the profile of digital preservation, producing and disseminating information on current developments and facilitating co-operation and collaboration in the development of a digital preservation agenda in the UK. Before joining the DPC in May 2003, Maggie was involved in a number of digital preservation projects and, with Neil Beagrie, is co-author of the Handbook of Digital Preservation Management.

Chris Rusbridge
Director of the Digital Curation Centre, whose overall mission is continuing quality improvement in data curation & digital preservation. Chris was previously Director of the Information Services at the University of Glasgow, active in the area of digital preservation, and before that he was Programme Director of the JISC Electronic Libraries Programme, where he was closely involved in many digital preservation activities including the CEDARS and CAMiLEON projects.

David Seaman
Executive Director of the Digital Library Federation (DLF). The DLF is a consortium of major academic libraries - with member institutions currently from the United States and Great Britain - who identify standards and "best practices" for digital collections and network access; who coordinate leading-edge research and development in libraries' use of electronic-information technology; and who incubate projects and services that libraries need but cannot develop individually ( http://www.diglib.org/ ). David joined the DLF in 2002 after 10 years at the Electronic Text Center at the University of Virginia Library, where he was the founding Director ( http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/ ). In this role, he oversaw the creation and development of an online archive of XML and SGML texts, of which many are available in multiple web and e-book formats. In addition, he has lectured and published extensively in the fields of humanities computing and digital libraries.