Parliamentary Academic Fellowship: Researching records held in the Parliamentary Archives relating to the Commonwealth

We have an exciting opportunity for a fellow to support the Parliamentary Archives to gain a better understanding of how to describe, make accessible, interpret, and promote the records held within the Parliamentary Archives about the Commonwealth.

About the fellowship

The Knowledge Exchange Unit in the POST runs the Parliamentary Academic Fellowship Scheme. This Scheme gives university-based researchers and staff working in knowledge exchange the opportunity to participate in a fellowship project with an office in Parliament.

This fellowship will be hosted by the Parliamentary Archives. The Parliamentary Archives collects, preserves and makes accessible the records of UK Parliament. It holds over 8km of physical records dating back to 1497 and its digital repository is growing rapidly. We provide an information management service for the House of Commons and House of Lords and operate a free public archives service. We have an active outreach programme which includes working with community groups, displays and digital engagement.

The aim of this project is for the Parliamentary Archives to gain a better understanding of how to describe, make accessible, interpret, and promote the records held within the Parliamentary Archives about the Commonwealth.

What will you be doing?

You will be supporting Archives staff to understand, promote and make more accessible the Commonwealth archive collections by reviewing the language used to describe these items within the online catalogue, which serves as a database of the collections held by the organisation.  Your main output of this fellowship project will be a report summarising the conclusions of your research into the Parliamentary Archives Commonwealth records. The report should make recommendations on how to improve the catalogue descriptions, apply best practice, prioritise work and give examples of resources required. The report should also suggest ways that the Parliamentary Archives can promote engagement with Commonwealth collections, highlighting underused or unknown archival material that could be used for outreach activities.

This is an exciting opportunity for the fellow to gain knowledge of Parliament and close access to its archival collections, to contribute to national initiatives to make archival collections more accessible and inclusive, and to inform future collection development and cataloguing procedures of a nationally and internationally significant collection.

Candidate requirements

The successful candidate should be able to demonstrate the following on their online application form:

• Research and analytical skills, with experience of interrogating catalogues, interpreting large volumes of information, and presenting this information in an impartial, accessible manner.
• Experience of researching the history of the Commonwealth and an understanding of current political debates surrounding the heritage sector, such as the ‘culture wars’, with particular reference to the description and interpretation of British Empire and/or Commonwealth records or objects.
• Excellent written and oral communication skills, with experience in communicating complex information to diverse, non-specialist audiences, in different contexts, and to achieve different goals, with an interest in working in public history.
• Ability to engage with emotive and sensitive subjects while working successfully with stakeholders, whilst upholding the values of equality, diversity and inclusion.
• Experience of planning, managing and delivering a project and engaging with multiple stakeholders, organisations or people.
• Ability to work independently and manage your own time while working to a schedule.

Conditions of the fellowship 

You must remain employed at your university or institution throughout the period of the fellowship.

You must seek funding to conduct this fellowship. Funds may be sought from research institutions or research funders. It is expected that funding will mainly come from impact funding sources such as Research Council Impact Acceleration Awards, HEIF funding or other specific university impact budgets.

Before submitting your application, you should confirm that you have support to undertake the project from your Head of Department at your university or institution, and that you have started to consider your source of funding for this project, including having had a conversation with the Budget Holder of your proposed funding source.

For more detail and advice on these conditions please see the Guidance Notes for Applicants, which can found with this vacancy or on https://www.parliament.uk/get-involved/research-impact-at-the-uk-parliament/academic-fellowships/posts-parliamentary-academic-fellowship-scheme/ .

Next steps

If you are interested in this fellowship, please submit your application form and writing sample (please use the MS Word document found above). This is not an employment recruitment process; an online recruitment portal is being used for best practice, including protection of your data and diversity monitoring. For more information on this fellowship or to contact the host team, please refer to the documents found above (Fellowship Description document and Guidance Notes for Applicants).