Charles Farrugia has been awarded a doctorate in archives and records management by the University of Aberystwyth, becoming the first Maltese to be awarded a PhD in that area of specialisation. Following his studies leading to a master’s in history from the University of Malta, he studied archives and records management at postgraduate level at the University of Northumbria in Newcastle and at University College London. Farrugia continued with his studies at Aberystwyth, one of the three UK universities offering such a qualification.

Farrugia successfully defended his thesis entitled ‘The role and organisation of EU national ar­chives: An application and evolution of the Dresner Model’. The study was carried out under the supervision of Prof. David Ellis and Dr Julie Dawn Mathias. It maps the development of EU national archives from a management pers­pective and applies the Dresner culture performance model on three cases studies – the UK National Archives in Kew, the National Archives of Finland and the State Archives of Cyprus. The study proposed adaptations in the application of the model in order for the creation of a new yardstick to measure performance in a national archives environment.

Dr Farrugia is Malta’s national archivist and a lecturer at the Department of Library, Information and Archive Sciences at the Faculty of Media and Knowledge Sciences, University of Malta. He is also on the executive boards of the Association of Commonwealth Archivists and Records Managers and the European Branch of the International Council on Archives.