RLUK and The National Archives (TNA) are pleased to announce the Fellows for the Professional Fellowship Scheme 2025-26. After a competitive application round, the scheme’s Board decided to award two Professional Fellowships for 2025-26. The successful candidates will commence the work on their proposed projects by the end of July 2025.

Professional Fellowships last for a year to 18 months and are structured around short-term visits to TNA, for RLUK Fellows, and RLUK member institutions, for TNA Fellows, underpinned by a longer period of peer-to-peer mentoring and knowledge sharing. Professional Fellowships focus on a professional-practice question, contribute to a wider piece of work, and facilitate shared learning between TNA and individual RLUK members with the purpose of overcoming some of the collective challenges facing research and cultural organisations.

Below are the Fellows for 2025-26 and details on their projects. The projects investigate pressing issues around the long-term accessibility and preservation of library and archival content as well as the development of inclusive collections.

2025-26 Fellows

Robert Chipperfield, Digital Content Officer, Archives Sector Leadership, The National Archives

Project: Reviewing historic mental health language in archives

Robert will conduct scoping work into contemporary language/ taxonomy used in archive collections around mental health conditions and neurodivergence. The aim will be to contextualise contemporary descriptions and, if possible, pilot alternative, updated, descriptions, that reflect current thinking around mental health/neurodivergent conditions.

Host Institution: TBC

Manuela Pallotto Strickland, Metadata and Digital Preservation Coordinator, King’s College London

Project: Semantic modelling of web archiving artefacts to support sustainable Long-Term Digital Preservation of web objects

Manuela’s project experiments with local and small-scale implementations of Semantic technologies, to explore and document their effectiveness in addressing versioning and context-related issues, in support of the long-term preservation of archived web content.

Host Institution: The National Archives