The winners of the ARA Excellence Awards were announced at the Gala Dinner of the Archives and Records Association Conference in Chester on the evening of Thursday 1st September.
Prof Michael Cook, a member of LUCAS, who worked at the University of Liverpool for many years, was awarded a Distinguished Service Award, whilst MARM graduate, Paul Stebbing, Archives and Local Studies Manager at Barnsley Council, accepted the Record Keeping Service of the Year award on behalf of Barnsley Archives and Local Studies.
The Archives and Records Association instituted the ARA Excellence Awards to recognise excellence and contributions by individuals and teams in the record keeping sector. The work of the sector is vital in supporting democracy and human rights and in preserving and sharing the heritage of the UK and Ireland.
Andrew Nicoll, Chair of ARA’s Board said:
“The ARA Excellence Awards are a wonderful opportunity to celebrate what is best about the record keeping sector and to encourage us all to strive for excellence. It is great to be able to make awards to people at the start of their careers and to those who have been working in the sector for five decades, demonstrating that what we are doing today, now, is where the good practice and excellence begin. In the case of those receiving the Distinguished Service Award for some of them the award is made because they have repeated that good practice, that excellence, that going-beyond throughout a long career within a single place, for others it is about a defining moment of bringing an important piece of work to fruition or making a specific contribution to a particular area. Both paths bring benefit to our sector and to the people who access our services and to the public in general whose history we keep safe and whose future we protect.”
The Distinguished Service Award recognises individual conservators, archivists or records managers for career-long achievement and/or outstanding work, e.g. successful management/implementation of a project; external fundraising that has transformed a resource or service; significant improvements to service delivery.
Although this award is not normally offered to recipients of the Ellis Prize (the highest honour awarded by the ARA) the Board recognised that Michael Cook has continued to offer exceptional service to the profession beyond his receipt of that award back in 1992 and that his contribution over many decades should be recognised by the accolade of ‘Distinguished Service’. He has made multiple contributions to archives, records management, education and other areas. Focussing on those achievements post 1992 he chaired the IT Group of the Society of Archivists and the Archival Description Project and was a vital contributor to the development of ISAD(G), and early standards for archival data exchange, based around the MARC format. Having recently retired as University Archivist, in 1994, he was appointed as Senior Fellow in the School of History at the University of Liverpool. He was a co-founder of the Liverpool University Centre for Archive Studies and played a significant role in convening the hugely important Political Pressure and the Archival Record conference. Michael’s contribution to archival education also continued after his retirement both in the UK and worldwide. Throughout his career, Michael’s contribution has both paid the attention to detail required for successful access to and exploitation of archives and recognised the widest societal impact of record-keeping work.
The Record keeping Service of the Year is awarded on the basis of a vote by members of the ARA.
Barnsley Archives and Local Studies achieved 54% of the vote and manager Paul Stebbing said:
“We are absolutely delighted to receive this excellence award following a period of much growth and activity for the service. Being a public vote, it really highlights to us just how much we are valued by our customers, stakeholders and supporters. They threw their unwavering support behind our nomination. The award will be a great motivator for the whole team. We want to continue to grow, to evolve and to encourage more people to use and enjoy our unique archive collections which cover 850 years of Barnsley’s rich history.”