Celebrating This Year's NAGARA Award Recipients

Congratulations to Our 2026 Honorees

NAGARA is proud to recognize the individuals and programs honored this year for their leadership, contributions, and innovation in government archives and records management. Awards will be presented at the Annual Awards Luncheon on Wednesday, July 22, 2026, at the Loews Philadelphia Hotel, as part of NAGARA's 2026 Annual Conference.

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Emerging Leader Award
Outstanding Contribution Award
Program Excellence Award

Emerging Leader Award

Alexandra Cardaropoli

Organization: City of Carrollton, Texas

Role: Records Analyst

Nominated by: Deborah Robbins

About the Award: The Emerging Leader Award recognizes early-career government archivists or records managers who have demonstrated significant promise of leadership, completed archival and records management work of merit, and performed commendable service to the profession. It is open to NAGARA members with two to ten years of professional experience in government archives and records management.

Why Alexandra Cardaropoli Received This Award

Alexandra "Ali" Cardaropoli built the City of Carrollton's Records Division from the ground up. In 2019, she developed the business case that led to the creation of her own position, and by 2021 the City Secretary's Office had earned a state compliance award based on the program's progress. In 2025, the division expanded to include two additional Records Coordinators overseeing Open Records, freeing Ali to focus on legal compliance, records retention and disposition, vendor coordination, and citywide records training.

Contributions to the Profession. Ali's work extends well beyond Carrollton's city limits. She created the city's entire Records Division from scratch, closing compliance gaps that had gone unaddressed, and she regularly develops trainings that she shares openly with peers across the profession.

Leadership Qualities. Outside her home organization, Ali serves as Co-VP of Membership for her local ARMA chapter and will step into the President Elect role for the coming year. She has also participated in a multi-year CRA/CRM study group, where she is known as a generous mentor and an encourager of others working toward certification.

Promotion of Inclusiveness. Ali designs her trainings for multiple generations and skill levels within her organization, and colleagues in her study group have adopted her training approaches in their own workplaces. She also hosts an annual "Carnival" event for Records and Information Management Month, an initiative that has driven greater cross-departmental collaboration in Carrollton.

Outreach and Advocacy. Ali is a featured speaker at NAGARA's 2026 Annual Conference, where she will present on records-related training strategies, a direct extension of the advocacy work she has built her career around. She is also currently writing a book on municipal records management.

"She doesn't let her youth limit her, and I am excited to see all that she will accomplish in the future."

Outstanding Contribution Award

Renée Wilson

Organization: Utah Division of Archives and Records Service (DARS)

Role: Records and Information Management (RIM) Consultant

Nominated by: Kendra Whitaker Yates

About the Award: The Outstanding Contribution Award recognizes individuals with at least ten years of service whose work has had a substantial and positive impact on their institution or on the archives and records management profession. It is open to all current and former NAGARA members.

Why Renée Wilson Received This Award

Renée Wilson has served as a RIM consultant with the Utah Division of Archives and Records Service for over twelve years, supporting state agencies across Utah in the full lifecycle of records management: identification, appraisal, scheduling, classification, and transfer to the State Archives.

Significant Organizational Impact. Renée was one of two people who led a multi-year effort to implement a Salesforce-based customer relationship management system for the Division, connected to a new learning management system supporting Utah's records officer certification course. The project included building an API integration, migrating data, creating an interactive certification course, and designing a public-facing customer portal, now known as the Records Officer Hub. Renée continues to co-administer both systems.

Professional Advancement. As Team Lead of the Division's State Government Team, Renée helped create FAQ and "Just Getting Started" resources tailored to different audiences, and she authored formal guidance documents including an Email Management Guideline, a Social Media Use Guideline, and materials on managing data with third-party vendors. She provided 837 individual agency consultations in the past year alone.

Innovation and Excellence. Renée designed and launched Utah's first Open Records Portal, giving the public a way to submit records requests to any state entity while allowing records officers statewide to view, track, and respond. More recently, she built an inventory tool to help agencies comply with new data privacy requirements, and she redesigned the Division's record series search function based on direct stakeholder input, a consistent hallmark of her approach.

Community Engagement and Advocacy. Renée has served nine years on the board of the ARMA International Utah Salt Lake Chapter, including two terms as president, during which she stabilized chapter finances and modernized its operations. She regularly produces newsletter content, social media resources, and educational materials, including a widely used Pac-Man-themed guide that helped Utah agencies navigate a major office relocation.

"Renée is the exact type of professional I want representing DARS. Her contributions have had a substantial, positive impact on our institution and the broader profession."

Program Excellence Award

FRASER

Program: FRASER (Federal Reserve Archival System for Economic Research)

Institution: A program of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis

About the Award: The NAGARA Program Excellence Award recognizes outstanding, innovative, and successful government archives and records management programs. It honors a team or program that has developed a creative initiative advancing government records management and preservation goals, with particular attention to collaboration, replicability, innovation, and impact.

Why FRASER Received This Award

Since 2004, FRASER has addressed a persistent and often overlooked gap in government records access: the loss of ephemeral materials, such as preliminary data releases, draft press releases, and superseded publications, that fall outside traditional agency retention schedules and library collection policies. What began as a historical adjunct to the Federal Reserve's FRED economic database has grown into a full digital library documenting more than a century of U.S. economic, financial, and banking history.

Collaboration. FRASER's model is built on partnership rather than competition. Its first formal digitization partnership, established with the Government Publishing Office in 2005, set the pattern for collaborations that now include the National Archives and Records Administration, the FDIC, the U.S. Treasury, the Library of Congress, and institutions such as Princeton, Harvard, and the Missouri Historical Society. FRASER also actively monitors the Federal Depository Library Program's Needs and Offers lists to identify materials at risk of being lost.

Replicability. FRASER's core approach, providing digitization capacity and public access infrastructure to institutions that hold valuable materials but lack the resources to make them accessible, is explicitly designed to be replicated elsewhere. Central banks on multiple continents have consulted with the FRASER team while building their own digital libraries, and the team is presenting on collaborative collection development strategies at NAGARA's 2026 Annual Conference.

Innovation and Creativity. Rather than treating preliminary data and press releases as disposable, FRASER built systematic lifecycle management for exactly the kind of material that traditional records schedules and library collection policies were never designed to capture. A notable example is FRASER's Financial Crisis Timeline project, in which staff tracked down and preserved over 300 documents related to the 2007-2009 financial crisis, many of which had already suffered link rot on their original agency websites, ensuring a contemporaneous historical record of the crisis remains accessible.

Impact. FRASER now serves more than 1.5 million users annually and aggregates over 687,000 items. Its materials have been cited nearly 2,000 times in scholarly literature over the past five years, and the program is used by researchers, journalists, educators, and policymakers, including current Federal Reserve officials, to understand the historical context behind economic decisions.

"Such a shining jewel for economic and financial historians that gets shinier every day."

Annual Awards Luncheon

With Congratulations

NAGARA thanks all nominees, nominators, and the Awards Committee for their role in recognizing excellence across the government archives and records management profession. Join us in celebrating this year's honorees at the Annual Awards Luncheon in Philadelphia.