C.F.W. Coker Award: Christopher Arena

Christopher Arena, archivist at New York Public Library, is the 2026 recipient of the C.F.W. Coker Award from the Society of American Archivists (SAA). The award recognizes finding aids, finding aid systems, innovative developments in archival description, or descriptive tools that enable archivists to produce more effective finding aids. To merit consideration for the award, nominees must set national standards, represent a model for archives description, or otherwise have a substantial impact on national descriptive practice.

The Paul Auster papers were processed by Arena from December 2024 to November 2025. The resulting finding aid consolidated six separate acquisitions and three previously published finding aids, producing a new EAD-encoded finding aid that meets current archival standards.

This new finding aid serves as an effective blueprint for managing evolving collections and integrating digital media. Its creation required a high level of cross-departmental collaboration to ensure that PDF extraction, digitization, and born-digital processing worked together to integrate the various media types for this collection. Arena was instrumental in ensuring that the project came together. Working from spreadsheets and the descriptions for the legacy finding aids, he was able to consolidate everything into a single container list before processing the three remaining acquisitions. He also developed an entirely new arrangement and rewrote nearly all the narrative descriptive elements. The resulting container list has very detailed narrative description which will help future researchers better navigate the collection. In addition, the new finding aid is laid out to demonstrate Auster’s writing process, illustrating how he moved from handwritten drafts to typewriter drafts before consolidating submission materials for editors and publishers. As noted by one reviewer, “the series arrangement strikes me as exemplary in the way it tracks with Auster’s creative work.”

Arena’s work sets a high standard for producing multimedia finding aids that bridge legacy and contemporary materials. His collaboration illustrates that high-level archiving is not a solitary task, and the processes he helped develop are already serving as a model for subsequent collections at the New York Public Library. 

Established in 1984, the award honors SAA Fellow C.F.W. Coker.