DSA 2025 - Sam Bartle for Distinguished Service In Digital Archives
This year the ARA Board were pleased to award the maximum of three Distinguished Service Awards.
These awards
The winners:
Sam Bartle for Distinguished Service In Digital Archives
Shirley Jones for Distinguished Service in Archive Conservation
Linda Ramsay for Distinguished Service in Archive Conservation
Sam Bartle for Distinguished Service In Digital Archives - Nomination:
Sam Bartle has worked as a professional archivist since 2005. He began his pre-professional career at Churchill Archives Centre, Cambridge in 2003, before moving to Rotherham Archives, post-qualification, but for the last 18 years of his professional life (since 2007) he has given service to the East Riding Archives in Beverley, East Yorkshire.
Here, he immediately set to work addressing the service’s digital collections, developing manual preservation and access workflows that culminated in the transition to a digital repository architecture with the procurement of Preservica, a system that currently contains over 3TB of born digital material, attracting around 16K online views annually. Having led on the business case, procurement, and rollout of Preservica in the Archives service, he has since been a mentor to Northumberland Archives as part of The National Archives’ (TNA) Digital Peer Mentoring Scheme.
He has also constantly worked to promote and advocate archives in the local region, setting up regular press features to promote the service, liaising with and appearing on local tv, radio, and print media, leading to guest columns in local publications.
From 2015, he began working to a specific digital remit and has helped move the service towards a more integrated ‘Digital-First’ approach, with various innovations and projects to increase digital capacity. This included a National Lottery Heritage Fund (NLHF) digitisation and community engagement project, a mobile app innovation, and online photographic prints service. In March 2021, The National Archives (TNA) commended the service for its digital capacity during the mid-term review of its Accreditation status, and again this year in 2025 on retention of Accredited status, TNA praised the “…archive service on its approach to the management of digital preservation and their creative outreach offer…”, to which Sam has made an integral contribution.
His ‘What Was Here?’ heritage tourism app innovation, in particular, has helped the service infiltrate mainstream visitor economies and disrupt preconceptions about archives, securing over 20,000 all-time downloads and earning him a shortlisting for ‘Content Creator’ at the 2023 Digital Culture Awards from Arts Council England, as well as a shortlisting for the service, and four Finalist nominations at the local tourism awards between 2020 and 2023. The app has been used to develop cross-sectoral partnerships within the tourism, academic, and heritage sectors and generated over £1k income from commissioned heritage trails from North Yorkshire Libraries, outside the Archives service’s regional remit.
The NLHF project ‘Trawling Through Time’ was conceived by Sam as a means of improving the in-house digitisation capacity of the service, while promoting the globally significant story of shipbuilding in Beverley, East Yorkshire. This resulted in procurement of hi-spec digitisation equipment for creating digital surrogates of outsize ships plans, production of a TV documentary broadcast to over 30,000 in the region, including a live premiere to 300 at the local cinema, as well as outreach and engagement using digital interfaces, and digital creativity workshops. The project involved over 40 volunteers and staff, and helped secure the long-term preservation of the digital surrogates of the ships plans in Preservica, as well as enhancing in-house digitisation capacity, leading to increased customer orders and revenue generation in the long-term.
He continued working to enhance digital communications for the service during the COVID-19 pandemic and beyond, negotiating commercial digitisation contracts with Ancestry, worth around £30K to date, and establishing new ways of maintaining customer interaction during lockdowns by developing a blog and social media channels. The social following for these platforms was built from the ground up e.g. 3.5K Facebook followers in its first year, and his colleagues are now using this as a basis for development. He has continued to further the digital ambition of the service by coordinating and publishing the ‘Archives 360’ virtual tour, and the ‘ARchives’ interactive augmented reality project, currently in development with colleagues, which seeks to generate 3D iterations of selected archival documents for an augmented reality showcase of East Riding Archives’ holdings.
This year, he has also retained his interest in the TNA Digital Peer Mentoring Scheme, acting as mentor to a web project based on women’s education history, run by Bishop Grosseteste University, Lincoln, and Sam has begun to investigate the use case for integrating AI transcription tools into service delivery, as well as continuing his cross-sectoral work with tourism and community engagement partners on the ‘What Was Here?’ app, diversifying the offer to include geocaching and film tourism, as a means of widening the user base and increasing the exposure of archival collections to new potential audiences.
Since 2007 Sam has consistently, and enthusiastically, spearheaded the interface of technology with Archives and its mainstream appeal, introducing new systems and innovations, to a point where it can be said that the service has adopted a ‘Business As Usual’ (BAU) approach to Digital in Archives, in which all colleagues now work towards innovating and facilitating digital outputs across the sphere of preservation and access, aligning closely with TNA’s strategy of ‘Archives For Everyone’.