The CLIR Postdoctoral Fellowship Program offers recent Ph.D. graduates the chance to develop research tools, resources, and services while exploring new career opportunities.
CLIR Postdoctoral Fellows work on projects that forge and strengthen connections among collections, digital technologies, and current research. Partner organizations benefit from fellows’ field-specific expertise by gaining insights into their collections’ potential uses and users, scholarly information behaviors, and current teaching and learning practices. CLIR facilitates the fellowship application processes. Fellows are then hired directly by partner organizations.
Goals
Leadership
To build leadership capacity for cultural heritage, higher education, and public service through establishing cohort unity, community building, and mutual support
Awareness
To broaden awareness of how current economic, technical, professional, and social changes are impacting cultural heritage, higher education, governments, and nonprofits
Changing Roles
To understand the changing roles of librarians, curators, researchers, and other subject specialists through direct, sustained contact with groundbreaking projects at partner organizations
Emerging Scholars
To introduce participants to the working cultures of partner organizations, with a special focus on data curation, management, and sharing
Relevant Resources
To provide fellows with relevant resources for further study, so that each can begin to build careers in cultural heritage, higher education, or allied domains
News & Events
Profiles in Data and Software Curation
This four-part series highlights the achievements of former CLIR data and software curation fellows. Inna Kouper interviewed eleven former data and software curation fellows who received fellowships between the years 2015 and 2018. The work of these and 40 more fellows was made possible with the generous support of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.
Program Evaluation Published
Liz Bishoff and Thomas F. R. Clareson have conducted a series of in-depth interviews, surveys, and focus groups with participants in CLIR's Postdoctoral Fellowship Program, focusing specifically on the fellowships in data curation for the humanities created with the support of the Mellon Foundation. Their report considers the impacts of these fellowships and lessons for others interested in nurturing new talent within the academic and cultural heritage sectors.
Curated Futures Project Updates
In 2023, CLIR released new essays as part of the fellow-led Curated Futures Project, a guide for professionals in galleries, libraries, archives, and museums to navigate beyond discussions of decolonizing collecting institutions to begin taking practical steps to enact change.
Featured Projects & Publications
Supporting Software Preservation Services in Research and Memory Organizations
This white paper from the Software Preservation Network’s Research-in-Practice Working Group presents findings from a survey- and interview-based study of software preservation service providers, including archivists, librarians, preservation specialists, technologists, and other information professionals. Former software curation fellow Seth Erickson coordinated this group's work on the project.
Capacity Assessment of Latin American and Caribbean Partners: Report of Symposium and Recommendations
In April 2020, the authors, CLIR fellows in the second cohort of Data Curation for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, virtually convened Capacity Assessment of Latin American and Caribbean Partners: A Symposium about Open Access, Technological Needs, and Institutional Sustainability.
Curated Futures Project: The Third Library is Possible
These collaborative projects not only speculate about aligning academic libraries with social impact, but they also provide demonstrative examples in a variety of mediums including podcast conversations, gamifying digital humanities, and mapping visualizations.
Fellows
Partner Organizations
Fellows in the USA
Fellows in Canada & Overseas
