AHRC-RLUK Professional Practice Fellowship

Announced in September 2021, the Professional Practice Fellowship scheme for academic and research libraries provides fellowships of up to £20,000 (80% Full Economic Costings) to enable library colleagues to set research agendas, be active participants and leaders of multidisciplinary research, and to provide intellectual leadership in their own disciplines and professional practices. The scheme is a direct result of the findings and recommendations of a joint scoping study undertaken by RLUK, AHRC, and Evidence Base (January-June 2021) regarding the role of academic libraries as research partners and leaders.

The Professional Practice Fellowship scheme was open to any colleague working within an academic library that belongs to a recognised Higher Education Institution (HEI), Independent Research Organisation (IRO), or Research Libraries UK member. The scheme provides a career development opportunity for library colleagues by enabling them to place their professional practice within a wider research context. Fellowships are an investment in the Fellows’ area of research and their potential as a researcher. As a result, they are designed to bring benefits to the individual fellow, their institution, and the wider academic library community.

The scheme originally comprised five available fellowships. This number was then doubled to ten fellowships during the assessment round, reflecting both the quality of applications to the scheme and in recognition of the important role that academic libraries can play as research partners and leaders. RLUK wishes to thank the AHRC for their generosity in both supporting the scheme and increasing the allocation of available fellowships.

My fellowship project, entitled The Lifelong Researcher: Supporting Doctoral Students’ Development of Digital Literacies, investigated how PhD students in history learn to find and use digital tools and resources for their work. Digital skills are a fundamental part of historical research in the twenty-first century: historians produce, consume, and interact with all manner of information online. Staff who work with doctoral students in history often assume that they begin their projects able to identify and seek out the information they need to achieve their research aims and professional goals. However, in my professional practice as a humanities librarian I have found that students start at a range of different skill levels, and they often find it difficult to apply self-assessment frameworks for digital skills to their specific needs. This project aims to investigate how PhD students learn to find and use digital resources in academic libraries, and how training programmes in digital skills could be improved to support lifelong learning and skills development through the completion of their degree and beyond.