Our Research Vision

Read the Research Vision 2024 - 2027

Our Research Vision sets out our plan of action for 2024 – 2027. It outlines our concept of what a researching archive might be: an institution that preserves the past, sustains the future, provides truly equitable access, and which travels beyond its own front doors to engage with the society of which it is part.

Four key themes

Our research will be shaped by four key themes, which respond to some of the biggest opportunities and challenges we face as an archive.

Trusted and secure custodianship

This research theme captures:

• Our challenges in appraisal, selection and sensitivity review, as we expand our archival practice to include new collections and real-time published court judgements, in becoming the ‘archive not just of government but of the state’;
• The use of technology, including AI, to help make decisions about what should be transferred to the archive;
• And the need to preserve physical and digital records, including AI models, independently of the software that was used to create them.

Our priorities are:

1. What should we collect, preserve and present, as we shape changing standards, practices and cultures in managing information, to fully realise the value of authenticity, trusted evidence and the archive in a democratic society?
2. How can we use AI and other emerging technologies, in an ethical, safe and transparent way, to solve our biggest archival practice challenges in preservation, selection and sensitivity review?
3. How do we use the latest advances in scientific and conservation practice to preserve the physical record for future generations?
4. How do we rethink our own role as a researching archive, creating encounters between different institutions and disciplines, and leading and learning from others in our research practice
5. Policy and legal infrastructure: understanding information legislation, data protection, and our role as custodian of the record of the state.

A responsible, sustainable future

As well as the records we hold, we must also protect the environment and the institutions that sustain them. This research theme captures:

• Our ambition to measure and reduce the environmental impact of our practice and of our physical and digital estate;
• And to use the untold wealth of geographical, environmental, ecological and geospatial information within our collection to inform the future through understanding the past.

Our priorities are:

1. How do we realise our collection’s potential to shape geographical, environmental and ecological histories, to inform a sustainable future?
2. How can we measure and mitigate the environmental impact of our digital estate?
3. How can we adapt our estate, practice and standards, to safeguard our collections in the most environmentally responsible way?
4. How can we facilitate opportunities for future research, supporting the development of researchers at all career stages and cultivating an inclusive research culture across our organisation and our partnerships?
5. Physical infrastructure: the state-of-the-art spaces, laboratories and repositories needed for the development, delivery and dissemination of cutting-edge research and scholarship.

Global, inclusive access

We believe that access should be global, for the many communities around the world represented within the record of the British state; and computational, to provide meaningful ‘big’ data for emerging technological approaches to the archive. This research theme captures:

• Our ambition to unlock our collections in new ways, for example through AI, optical character recognition (OCR) and handwritten text recognition (HTR);
• To foreground global majority voices in our collection and centre the communities represented, working in partnership with other global institutions;
• And to overcome the immediate challenges of hazardous materials in our collection and distributed data within our heritage science and conservation practice.

Our priorities are:

1. How do we make global majority histories and marginalised voices visible, in an ethical, inclusive and meaningful way, within and through our collections?
2. How can we use AI, OCR/HTR and other emerging technology to datafy our digitised collections and provide computational access to our born-digital collections on a national and global scale?
3. How do we enable safe and global access to the whole of our material collection, including where it is hazardous; and comprehensive access to our heritage science and conservation data?
4. How do we ensure open and equitable access to our research outputs, outcomes and opportunities?
5. Digital infrastructure: an open, sustainable and cost-effective digital estate for our digital collection and research outputs.

The archive within and for our society

We believe that archives should mean something to everyone. The archive can be an institution that helps us both understand and shape our own wellbeing and social identity. It can be a place where stories come to life, and where our users are fully empowered, including by the latest technological tools, to research our collection.

Our priorities are:

1. How do we advance interdisciplinary scholarship in medical and health humanities, and realise the archive’s contribution to health, wellbeing and place?
2. How can we use human-computer interaction (HCI), emerging technologies and other digital scholarship approaches to empower the widest-possible audience of archive users?
3. How do the material and visual histories of our collection enhance our collective understanding of our shared history?
4. How do we actively engage different audiences and research communities in impactful ways, maintaining a reflexive and inclusive approach to research practice, engagement and development?
5. National infrastructure: realising the economic and social value of The National Archives and the wider archives sector.

Research roadmap

Our Roadmap has been developed to connect our strategic Research Vision to the work of our Research, Grants and Academic Engagement Department, the central hub for research and research funding, engagement and impact within The National Archives.

The Roadmap translates the key themes of our Research Vision into a series of tangible steps that will be undertaken by the Department in 2024 – 2027, to support The National Archives as a whole.

We will:

1. Create projects, build skills and develop a clear pathway for researchers across the breadth of our research practice.
2. Realise the benefit and societal impact of our research to our strategy, working within a strong governance structure.
3. Create the technical, procedural and cultural infrastructure that we need, to accept uncertainty and embrace opportunities in an ethical and inclusive way.
4. Connect with our research ecosystem, through our publications, training, events, partnerships and wider research engagement.