Archival Innovator Award

Purpose and Criteria for Selection:

The Archival Innovator Award recognizes an archivist, a group of archivists, a repository, or an organization that demonstrates the greatest overall current impact on the profession or their communities. Nominee(s) should meet as many of the following criteria as possible:    

  • Creativity or innovation in approaching professional challenges;
  • Demonstrated ability to think outside of professional or institutional norms;
  • Ability to translate creativity, innovation, and new thinking into working solutions;
  • Development of an archives program or outreach activity that has an extraordinary impact on a community; and/or
  • Commitment to the advancement of professional knowledge through traditional or emerging information-sharing media.  

The work should be undertaken within the past three years—it need not be completed, but it must be sufficiently advanced to demonstrate results.

Sponsor and Funding:

Created in 2011, thie award is funded by the Society of American Archivists Foundation.

Prize:

A certificate and complimentary registration for the recipient(s) (if a repository or an organzation, then one representative) to the SAA Annual Meeting occurring in the year in which the award is presented. 

First Awarded:

2012

Selection Committee

The Archival Innovator Award is selected by the Contributions to the Archives Profession Subcommittee of the SAA Awards Committee.  

Submission Deadline and Nomination Form:

Click here to preview the nomination form and/or to start a nomination. All nominations must be submitted by February 28 of each year.  

 

Archival Innovator Award Recipients

2025: Recollection: A Civil Rights Legal Archive

2024: Indigenous Archival Training Program

2023: Opioid Industry Documents Archive 

2022: Community-Driven Archives at Arizona State University Library AND the Center for Michigan Jewish Heritage

2021: National Archives and Records Administration’s History Hub

2020:  Invisible Histories Project

2019:  Brooklyn Connections, a school outreach program of the Brooklyn Public Library

2018:  Dr. Doug Boyd, director of the Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History in the University of Kentucky Libraries

2017:   No applicants

2016:   Dr. Foy Scalf, head of the Research Archives and Integrated Database Project Team at the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago

2015:   State Archives of Florida's Florida Memory Team

2014:   Trevor Owens, National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program at the Library of Congress

2013:   Augmented Processing Table Research Team, The University of Texas at Austin School of Information, Dr. Ciaran B. Trace and Dr. Luis Francisco-Revilla

2012:   Not awarded