USU's Stephen C. Sturgeon Receives Service Award from Regional Association

Stephen C. Sturgeon, manuscript curator in Special Collections and Archives at Utah State University, is the recipient of the 2011 CIMA Service Award presented by the Conference of Inter-Mountain Archivists.

The Conference of Inter-Mountain Archivists presents two top awards annually — the CIMA Life-Time Achievement Award and the Service Award. Max J. Evans, a member of the LDS Church History Department, received the lifetime award.

Founded in 1973, the Conference of Inter-Mountain Archivists is an association of archivists, conservators, historians and other archive professionals in the Intermountain West. Its membership is open to all, and institutions in Utah, Nevada, Arizona, Idaho and New Mexico are represented.

The organization’s two top honors are bestowed annually to individuals who have “demonstrated considerable service and leadership in the Intermountain West region and who have made significant contributions to the CIMA organization and/or the archival profession,” the organization’s announcement said. The CIMA Life-Time Achievement Award recognizes the work of an entire career. The Service Award recognizes important work and activity but is presented to an individual not at the career-level mark.

“Both awards are presented with the highest honor and gratitude by the peers and colleagues of the recipients,” the organization said.

USU’s Sturgeon was honored for his leadership in several archival and historical organizations. He has served on the steering committee for manuscripts repository section for the Society of American Archivists and served a term as chair of the Hamer-Kegan Award Committee. He is past chair of the Utah Manuscript Association and served as CIMA president 2002-03.

When he received the telephone call informing him of the award, Sturgeon was “stunned, amazed — I didn’t anticipate the honor,” he said. “After reflecting a bit, I realized it was a wonderful thing to have something like this — to be honored by your working colleagues and fellow professionals.”

Richard Clement, dean of libraries at USU, congratulated Sturgeon.

“I am very pleased that Steve’s significant contributions to the profession have been honored in this award,” Clement said. “His professional stature has been a reflection of the importance and impact of the research collections he has built and maintained during his tenure in the library’s department of Special Collections and Archives. His achievement is an honor for the whole library and Utah State University.”

The award also comes at a time when Sturgeon will mark a shift in his professional career, so the award, while not of the “lifetime” variety, is meaningful.

Sturgeon will leave USU in May to enter a one-year residency in the chaplaincy training program at St. Marks Hospital in Salt Lake City.

“This honor is very fitting for Steve Sturgeon,” said Brad Cole, associate dean for Special Collections and Archives, Merrill-Cazier Library. “During his tenure at Utah State University, Steve has been an important part of the success of Special Collections. This award sums up a strong professional career in archives at USU. He will be missed by his professional colleagues throughout the state of Utah and the nation. We wish him well in his future endeavors.”

Sturgeon, an ordained deacon in the Episcopal Church, completed an earlier internship at St. Marks as part of that process. The experience influenced him greatly, he said.

“My earlier experience was very powerful and stayed with me afterwards,” Sturgeon said. “I came to realize I wanted to do that for the rest of my life.”

Sturgeon joined the faculty at USU in 1999 in Special Collections and Archives. He received tenure and a promotion from assistant to associate librarian in 2005. In addition to his role as manuscript curator, Sturgeon is an adjunct associate professor of history at USU.

A native of the San Francisco, Calif., area, Sturgeon earned an undergraduate degree at Grinnell College in Grinnell, Iowa, a noted liberal arts college. He earned a master’s of library science from UC Berkeley and his doctorate in American history from the University of Colorado at Boulder. His dissertation was published as a book by the University of Arizona Press, The Politics of Western Water: The Congressional Career of Wayne Aspinal. His most recent publication is a chapter in Utah in the Twentieth Century, “The Disappearance of Everett Ruess and the Discovery of Utah’s Red Rocks Country.”

Evans, the CIMA lifetime award recipient, was honored for his decades-long work promoting the wider use of archives. He is a founding member of CIMA and is a nationally recognized figure in the archives profession. He was elected Fellow of the Society of American Archivists in 1984.

Evans also has ties to Utah State University where he earned a master’s degree from the Department of History in 1971. While at USU he was a graduate editorial fellow (1969-71) in the offices of the Western Historical Quarterly, founded in 1969 in the history department under the editorship of professors S. George Ellsworth and Leonard J. Arrington. Evans’s master’s thesis explored the history of the public library movement in Utah. He went on to work at the State Historical Society of Wisconsin in the 1980s, and in the 1990s, he was director of Utah’s Division of State History.

Sturgeon and Evans will be honored during a luncheon at the CIMA Spring Conference in Boise, Idaho (May 19-20).

Related links:

Conference of Inter-Mountain Archivists

USU Special Collections and Archives

USU University Libraries

Source: Conference of Inter-Mountain Archivists

Contact: Michael Frazier, CIMA Awards Committee chair, (702) 895-2230, michael.frazier@unlv.edu

Contact: Stephen C. Sturgeon, USU Special Collections and Archives, (435) 797-0891, Stephen.Sturgeon@usu.edu