At The National Archives we do a range of research which is underpinned by our role as Keeper of the national record and archives sector lead.

And we have a range of research-active staff whose different specialisms range from history to conservation science to data and computing.

And all of our research is underpinned by an interest in interpreting, preserving and providing access to archives.

We have developed conceptual themes which act as our research priorities and these range from openness, access and use

To risk, uncertainty and trust to citizen, law and state. And they're a way of capturing the range of different challenges that we have

Both as an organisation that keeps archives ourselves and as archives sector lead.

Under those headings we've developed statements of intent that draw out the key research questions that we want to tackle.

The statements of intent and the research themes are designed to act as an internal compass for us.

So that we know internally and we can articulate to all of our staff what our research should be orientated around.

But importantly, they're also an indicator to academics that we want to partner with

Some of whom will come from disciplines that we haven't engaged with much in the past, so we're looking to collaborate with

Mathematicians, people from computing, data scientists who can help us unpick some of our core digital archiving challenges.

The National Archives has been really keen to develop the infrastructure that we need to support our research activities going forward.

One initiative has been to create a new Research Hub which is an internal space within our building.

That space is open to all research-active staff across the organisation who can come to use it to collaborate together on interdisciplinary research projects.

We also see it as a home for our long-term academic collaborators who are working with us on our research projects.

And we also want it to be open to our doctoral students.

The idea behind the Research Hub is to create a research community at The National Archives

And its a way of developing our reputation as an excellent host for high quality interdisciplinary research.

We run a number of academic programmes at The National Archives.

We do quite a few things for doctoral students, we have doctoral students in-house through Collaborative Doctoral Partnerships and Collaborative Doctoral Awards.

We also work with a number of Doctoral Training Partnership schemes, for example we run a very successful PAST training skills workshop.

Which is about teaching academics essential archival skills.

We also run a number of events for academics including our Big Ideas seminar series, digital experimentation workshops and an annual academic lecture series.

These are really important in creating a platform at The National Archives for getting people together to showcase research that happens both around our collections and around our core recordkeeping challenges.

The National Archives is really well-known for its historically-focussed research that it does around our collections.

And that's one of our core strengths and we want to continue to champion that type of research.

But we also want to engage much more strongly in research around our recordkeeping challenges, particularly coming out of our Digital Strategy

So that we can work to create the disruptive archive, so that we can be leaders in the field, so that we can take the archives sector on a journey

And give them the tools and technologies that they need to embrace the brave new world of digital records.