ARA Excellence Awards 2025 - winners announced

ARA Excellence Awards 2025

The annual ARA Excellence awards are a chance to celebrate the best the record-keeping sector and to raise the profile of archivists, conservators and records managers across the UK and Ireland.

The Archives and Records Association created the awards to recognise excellence and contributions by individuals and teams in our sector. ARA has four special awards: Distinguished Service Award (DSA), Record Keeper of the Year, Record Keeping Service of the Year, New Professional of the Year Award.

This year two nominations were received for Record Keeper of the Year, five nominations for Record-keeping Service of the Year, no nominations were received for New Professional of the Year. These three awards are decided by public vote. Over all 1,915 votes were cast, 821 for the Record Keeper of the Year nominees and 1,788 for the Record-keeping Service of the Year nominees.

There were five nominees for Record-Keeping Service of the Year, nearly 1,800 votes were cast:

·       Gloucestershire Archives             32 per cent

·       Buckinghamshire Archives           24 per cent

·       London Archives                           22 per cent

·       City of Westminster Archives      12 per cent

·       Central Bank of Ireland                10 per cent

The extremely strong field of nominations is shown in the closeness of the vote and it is worth celebrating the depth of excellence that the UK and Ireland record-keeping sector can demonstrate through these nominations.

More than 800 votes were cast in the contest for Record Keeper of the Year and Chloe received 74 per cent of these votes and the other nominee, Luke Mayo gained 26 per cent.

Distinguished Service Awards are decided by the ARA Board and they made the maximum of three awards this year.

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

Full nominations for each of the winners can be found here. The winners were announced at the Gala Dinner of the 2025 ARA Conference in Bristol on 28th August 2025.

The winners are:

Record Keeper of the Year – Chloe Anderson-Wheatley

Chloe is the first person from the Falkland Islands to win this award, she is the Corporate Records & National Archives Manager; overseeing both the Falkland Islands Government’s (FIG) corporate records management service and the Jane Cameron National Archives (JCNA).

Over the past eighteen months Chloe has significantly raised the profile of the Island’s National Archives service, massively increasing local and international engagement and awareness with the collections, and has built new partnerships to the benefit of her service, the heritage of the Falkland Islands, and ARA’s international community.

Read Chloe’s full nomination here.

Record-Keeping Service of the Year – Gloucestershire Archives

Gloucestershire Archives are a worthy winner - running a strong and well-respected accredited archives service covering the counties of Gloucestershire and South Gloucestershire.  Over the last 18 months they have collaborated and worked in partnership with a wide range of people and organisations to deliver innovative and impactful projects and are keen to share the results with the wider sector. 

As a service they are constantly seeking new ways to broaden their appeal and engage with their users. Staff have access to all types of training, from in-house mentoring to external courses, which helps spark creativity, deepen knowledge and ultimately improve our visitor experience. For the past 18 months, we have been fortunate to have a level 3 apprentice working in our Access & Engagement Team.  The service has also been leading the way for the sector in tackling climate change via their Lottery funded Green Pledge Project which began in October 2023 and focuses on cataloguing large environmental collections and developing community-led collecting initiatives whilst reducing the carbon footprint of the service and those we engage through activities.

Read their full nomination here.

Distinguished Service Awards

Sam Bartle - Distinguished Service in Digital Archives

Sam Bartle has worked as a professional archivist since 2005 for the last 18 years of his professional life has worked for the East Riding Archives in Beverley, East Yorkshire.

He wins the award for Distinguished Service in Digital Archives.  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.

Read Sam’s full nomination here.

Shirley Jones – Distinguished Service in Archive Conservation

Shirley is Head of Conservation for the West Yorkshire Archive Service. Throughout her career Shirley has been involved in numerous move projects for West Yorkshire Archive Service. She has led on the design of repository spaces across the county and has also offered her expertise in this area to other archival institutions in Yorkshire. Perhaps, one of her most important achievements, Shirley is a strong advocate for training within the heritage sector. She has been involved in the training of archive professionals across the sector on preservation, handling and disaster preparedness and has provided training to numerous groups including the community archives network group in West Yorkshire as well as being involved with the Archive and Records Association’s Archive Conservation Training Scheme

“Shirley is one of the best, if not the best archive conservator in the UK. She is held in very high regard in the world of archive conservation. She is a great teacher and is the person that conservators of many years standing will go to for advice.” Mark Allen, Conservator, North East Wales Archive.

Read Shirley’s full nomination here.

Linda Ramsay – Distinguished Service in Archive Conservation

Linda Ramsay has been Head of Conservation at the National Records of Scotland since the 1990s and when first recruited helped advise on the building of a new record repository which would be as efficiently climate controlled as possible, and with conservation facilities.

Through an internship programme for conservators, she enabled the NRS to take advantage of expertise an perspectives from outside the UK. As well as being an instructor on the ARA training scheme, she is  an assessor for ICON accreditation and currently a trustee for the June Baker Trust, awarding grants for training in conservation. She is Chair of the Preservation committee of the Scottish Council on Archives (SCA), and a lead in producing the recent 'Salvaging Library and Archive Collections'. She sits on a group reviewing British Standards relating to archive and is a leading member of the  professional  committee  reviewing British Standards BS 4971:2002, Repair and allied processes for the conservation of documents. She is a corresponding member to PAS 198 standard,  a key contributor to Royal Society of Edinburgh (RSE) Grant Award collaboration with Glasgow University and National Library of Scotland Looking at Scottish Medieval Cartularies, a key member of the Heads of National Organisations Conservation Group, and a member of the group devising mould guidance published on the TNA website, followed by the training day ‘Spores for Thought – Mitigating and Managing Mould’ this past week. She also chairs the Conservation Training Development Committee.

“She loves Scotland's history as much as she loves the country itself.”

Deborah Rohan, retired Conservator

Read Linda’s full nomination here.

At the awards ceremony the Archive Conservation Training Scheme certificate was awarded to Rhydian Davis who works at the National Library of Wales. He enrolled on the scheme in 2018 and was one of the trainees who had to negotiate life, work and the training scheme through Covid, which was no easy feat! Rhydian’s hard work and dedication to the conservation profession shone through during his training and comments from instructors often reflected on how hard working and methodical Rhydian is. The assessment panel noted that Rhydian has developed into a skilled and competent archive conservator and awarded him a pass with credit.