Between 2004 and 2024, the CLIR Postdoctoral Fellowship Program offered recent Ph.D. graduates the chance to develop research tools, resources, and services while exploring new career opportunities in libraries and other academic and cultural organizations.

Fellows worked on projects to forge and strengthen connections among collections, digital technologies, and current research. Their fellowships and subsequent careers have helped inform CLIR’s programming related to digital libraries, special collections and archives, research, and outreach to new communities.

Collected on these pages are some of the achievements of the 221 fellowship alumni from the 18 fellowship cohorts who participated in the program.

Over the program’s history, fellows worked at 93 unique host organizations. Fellows came from more than 50 distinct academic disciplines, applying their research and teaching talents to enhance collections and services while acquiring skills in areas such as digital library development, archival practice, community outreach, and data and software curation.

For more about the program’s history, explore the “See Fellows’ Work” page and the CLIR publications about the program listed below. Although CLIR is no longer creating new fellowships through this program, CLIR staff continue to consult with library and cultural heritage leaders seeking to create new term-limited and permanent positions suitable for the skills of recent PhDs, especially when candidates may lack significant experience working in libraries. Copies of the internal guidelines created for CLIR’s former fellows and supervisors are available by request.