Location: St Pancras
Contract: Fixed term (12 months)
Hours: Full time (36 hours)
Grade: B
Salary: £35,993 per annum

About the role
Co-design a research project with the Library for a 12-month funded-fellowship, where you will be embedded in our expert curatorial and research teams.

Thanks to a generous donation from Joanna and Graham Barker, these fellowships are designed to support and equip researchers, creatives, and cultural professionals with the practical skills, professional insight, and interdisciplinary experience needed to thrive in a rapidly changing knowledge landscape. A key element of this opportunity is a structured pathway for Fellows to gain transferable, future-facing skills, project- and line-management experience, feel supported within our research community, and generate new expertise for the wider cultural and academic ecosystem.

We are inviting research proposals that develop the theme of 'Local Large Language Models to Enable Discovery and Access for Personal Digital Archives.' This fellowship will be supervised by Callum McKean, Lead Curator for Born-Digital Archives, and supported by the Research Development Team.

Personal Digital Archives (PDAs) are collections of born-digital materials created over a person's life and work. These include e-mails, documents, photographs, system files, voice recordings, and other digital content. The Library's collection is the largest and most significant in the UK, and we play a leading international role in developing their preservation, description, and access.

Despite their value, PDAs present major challenges due to their scale and sensitive content and, as a result, many of these collections remain inaccessible to the public. The Fellow will explore how 'local' (offline) Large Language Models (LLMs) can be applied to PDAs, developing a case study approach to demonstrate how these tools can improve access and interpretation.