KAPTUR conference, London, March 2013

  1. @jiscdatapool colleagues Clare and Adam should be arriving at Kaptur #jiscmrd workshop. Looking forward to hearing their report.
  2. At the #jiscmrd #kaptur_mrd workshop today – picked up lots of fabulous resources already – as to be expected of an arts project! 😉
  3. #kaptur_mrd have put together a research data word search for the closing conference #jiscmrd
  4. For those at #kaptur_mrd – here is the KAPTUR blog bit.ly/15sYNmu with lots of information about the project #jiscmrd
  5. Research data matters in the visual arts – introductory presentation from Leigh Garrett, VADS Director and KAPTUR Principal Investigator
  6. #kaptur_mrd hightlights 1) What is research data in the visual arts: extremely complex question which the project has explored #jiscmrd
  7. #kaptur_mrd hightlights 2) Policy adoption: almost there across the four institutions, with policies on managing research data #jiscmrd
  8. #kaptur_mrd highlights 3) Infrastructure: complex user requirements led to lack of comprehensive solution, but knowledge developed #jiscmrd
  9. #jiscmrd thought provoking questions to hand over after the end of the event **how what you learnt today will impact on yr practice?**
  10. Keynote: Research data – challenges for the visual arts – Kerstin Mey, Director of Research and Enterprise, University for the Creative Arts
  11. Now up at #kaptur_mrd Kerstin Mey, Director of research and enterprise at UCA: research data challenges for the visual arts #jiscmrd
  12. Definition of research data, from Edinburgh: ‘data which arises out of, and evidences, research’ #kaptur_mrd #jiscmrd
  13. @fmuir See also our research data and other definitions in our repository support pages: ed.ac.uk/schools-department…
    #kaptur_mrd #jiscmrd
  14. Fascinating overview of research data in the visual arts at #kaptur_mrd. Question: do artists also want to cite data? #jiscmrd
  15. #kaptur_mrd @brian_hole I can very well imagine artists, critics, historians wanting to reference ‘data’ (workings, materials, etc) #jiscmrd
  16. At the final KAPTUR workshop in London today. Excellent so far, providing inspiration for DCC’s future Arts support work. #jiscmrd #ukdcc
  17. Supporting Research Data Management: the JISC MRD programme – Simon Hodson, JISC MRD Programme Manager
  18. #kaptur_mrd @simonhodson99 giving an overview of #jiscmrd & thinking about what research data actually is “…it’s the workings”
  19. Really good intro to Data Managment and Ideas on implementation for researchers
    opus.bath.ac.uk/30772 #jiscmrd
  20. royalsociety.org/policy/pro…

    Science as an Open Enterprise #jiscmrd

    cc @lescarr Sure you know all about this stuff anyway

  21. Piloting KAPTUR in the Arts – Carlos Silva, KAPTUR Technical Manager
  22. Wonderfully visual presentation now from Carlos Silva, #kaptur_mrd technical officer #jiscmrd
  23. #jiscmrd Q: which technical system is the most suitable for managing data?
  24. #kaptur_mrd identified short list of six systems for managing visual arts data: DataFlow, ePrints, DSpace, Fedora, CKAN, Figshare #jiscmrd
  25. interesting evernote not be included in the technical analysis ? #jiscmrd (I’m not a big fan but…just wondering) #eprints – final 4 yay 😀
  26. #jiscmrd not all the research output in Arts is in digital format
  27. nice ckan upload form. EdShare UI could work like this stepped approach for inputing materials…#eprints @edsharesoton #edshareredux #jiscmrd
  28. #jiscmrd CKAN Impressive functionality of imputing & showing art research data – demo by Carlos Silva
  29. Great closing gag from Carlos ‘FIN (ish…)’ – there will be ongoing work on CKAN with other #jiscmrd projects and the community #kaptur_mrd
  30. ckan is where you collect your stuff (desktop client ala evernote?) then connects to ePrints as the place for the finished output #jiscmrd
  31. Raising the profile of Research Data Management: the UCA story – Anne Spalding, KAPTUR Project Officer
  32. #jiscmrd Great digital storytelling presentation by Anne Spalding
  33. #jiscmrd key messages to take away: Communicate- Disseminate- Collaborate by Anne Spalding #kaptur_mrd
  34. Research data matters in the visual arts. Follow #kaptur_mrd for interesting thoughts from today’s workshop kapturmrd.eventbrite.co.uk/ #jiscmrd
  35. Towards a research data management policy at Goldsmiths – Andrew Gray, KAPTUR Project Officer
  36. Goldsmiths will have training aims at gathering data for the repository #jiscmrd #kaptur_rdm
  37. PI takes responsibly to work with the Research Data Management policy at GS – Goldsmiths using ePrints – Tetrabyte(?) of Storage #jiscmrd
  38. #jiscmrd think how a RDM policy will impact on researchers workload – key recommendation by Andrew Gray
  39. I believe ePrints has pretty good stats. at least the data i grabbed from EdShare also built on ePrints is nice #jiscmrd
  40. Arts Research Data. It’s as easy as 123 or is that ABC? – Robin Burgess, KAPTUR Project Officer
  41. #jiscmrd Very creative approach to relate an A-Z terminology for #RDM in Glasgow School of Art
  42. #jiscmrd need to check YouTube later for this song singing what is #RMD
  43. wow KAPTUR project seems to have really moved forward Art & Design Research Data Management & implementation at project partners #jiscmrd
  44. Important question: what licence are you using for artistic materials/outputs/data in the GSA repository? #kaptur_mrd #jiscmrd
  45. GSA are still working on licensing and advice – VADS have issues with CC0 #kaptur_mrd #jiscmrd
  46. Engaging policies at UAL: towards a policy for Research Data Management – Sarah Mahurter, KAPTUR Project Officer
  47. Archiving the process is a term that resonated at UAL, rather than ‘research data’ #jiscmrd #kaptur_mrd
  48. @UALKaptur mentioning Charlotte Hodes – see detail of papercut on #jiscmrd #kaptur_mrd USB stick – if you look closely u can see figures!
  49. University of the Arts London research data management policy and some guidance bit.ly/PmmE3O #jiscmrd #kaptur_rdm
  50. Mahurter argues that there are unique issues and opportunities in looking after research data / assets at UAL #jiscmrd #kaptur_mrd
  51. Research data matters in the visual arts – #jiscmrd #flickstackr – my Flickr pics from today #fb flickr.com/photos/procter/s…

KAPTUR – one month to go…

This is our update for KAPTUR for February with one month of the project left to run!

WP1: Project Management

  • The project team had meetings on 31st January and 28th February in order to both report and monitor progress of outstanding tasks.
  • The Project Manager has begun final reporting procedures for JISC.

WP3: Technical Infrastructure

  • The Technical Manager has completed a case study on the technical aspects of the project which will be presented at the KAPTUR conference on 6th March.
  • The Project Officers have uploaded visual arts research data to the EPrints pilot repository.
  • The Technical Manager has resolved issues with the CKAN pilot repository and will be completing development work on this soon.

WP4: Modelling

  • The fourth and final RDM policy was approved by The Glasgow School of Art’s Research and Knowledge Exchange Committee on 13th February.
  • The four policies will be made available through DCC in due course and will also be linked to from the KAPTUR Outputs page.
  • This work package is now closed.

WP5: Training and Support

  • The Glasgow School of Art training workshop took place on 31st January with the assistance of Laura Molloy, JISCMRD Evidence Gatherer. The presentations are available here: http://www.slideshare.net/kaptur_mrd/tag/gsardmtraining
  • The fourth and final training workshop took place on 22nd February at Goldsmiths, University of London with assistance from Kerry Miller of the Digital Curation Centre. The presentations are available here: http://www.slideshare.net/kaptur_mrd/tag/goldrdmtraining
  • The first draft of the KAPTUR toolkits has been completed using Xerte Online Toolkits. They will be completed by the close of the project and made available both online and through JORUM for use and re-use.

WP6: Evaluation and Sustainability

  • The four case studies from the Project Officers as well as the additional fifth case study from the Technical Manager have been completed and are being edited for online publication.
  • A template for the KAPTUR Business, Financial and Sustainability Plans was circulated to the Project Officers for use in their institutions.
  • The Glasgow School of Art have already completed a good draft of their Business Plan using the template.
  • The Project Manager is awaiting feedback from the final workshop, the conference, and another short survey before completing the Benefits’ reporting.

WP7: Dissemination


CKAN4RDM workshop

With thanks to Carlos Silva, KAPTUR Technical Manager, for the following blog post.

On 18th February I attended a workshop led by the JISC funded Orbital project, to gather information about the open source software CKAN and how it could be used to support research data management in the academic sector.

The workshop started with a presentation from Mark Wainwright (community co-ordinator for the Open Knowledge Foundation) on the latest release of CKAN, its origins and potential in the academic community.

One of the big advantages with using CKAN is that the ‘core’ system is surrounded by APIs allowing it to be flexible enough to accommodate different user and institutional needs. This means that the core software can be updated without affecting the APIs or having to adapt external code to fit with the core software.

Another important feature that looks promising is the ability of CKAN to not only harvest other CKAN databases, but also to search other types of repositories such as EPrints and DSpace. The mechanism developed covers different repository sources not only EPrints and DSpace, but also Geospatial Servers, Web catalogues and other HTML index pages.

In terms of sustainability, CKAN has been developed over the last 6 years, so it is relatively mature now with an extensive and very streamlined workflow process to add features, fix bugs and enhance the core services. The latest version 2.0 (recently released as Beta) promises to be an exciting release with more visually enhanced tools, improved groups feature, customisable metadata and a rich search experience based on their Apache Solr search.

The workshop continued with a presentation from the data.bris project at the University of Bristol. It is amazing to note that each Principle Investigator can apply for up to 5TB of storage for free and backed up securely for 20 years!

Academics receive a mapped network drive which they can access and use to deposit content, however this requires additional features to manage research data. Therefore, the data.bris project was interested in CKAN due to its flexibility, data access (ability to have private datasets), organisation schema, ability to share with external researchers and the CKAN search engine.

In the future, the University of Bristol is considering two instances of CKAN, one for a public read-only catalogue of research data publications and another for controlled access (which would include teaching and other types of data).

The third presentation was from Orbital; Project Manager Joss Winn provided a virtual tour of the latest tools developed by the project. They have connected CKAN between different instances: to their EPrints repository and also to different departmental databases, such as an awards management system.

The Orbital set up allows their researchers to have different types of data located in a central place, this includes the policies, profiles, publications and analytics information from specific outputs, making the most of the CKAN software.

The demonstration included mention of the software created to enable deposit of data from CKAN to their EPrints repository – something which we have been anticipating for the last few months and is an exciting development for the sector. Orbital have released the code through Github which in theory should work with CKAN version 1.7. The functionality enables CKAN to submit the metadata to EPrints using the SWORD2 protocol but not the actual files themselves – instead a link is added to EPrints which links back to the files deposited in CKAN.

The Orbital team are proposing a two year roadmap to their senior management team to take responsibility and carry this project forward and embed it further into the University of Lincoln’s infrastructure.

During the group discussion session, workshop participants suggested a comprehensive list of about 80 tools, features, amendments and requests that we would like to see as part of a new version of CKAN (a Google Docs spreadsheet is available: http://lncn.eu/mxz2). Again in groups we did a GAP analysis for the specific items requested and a CKAN expert was available to answer any questions.

As an academic community we found that there were lots of similar challenges which should be easier to address collaboratively.

From the visual arts community perspective although CKAN can’t currently address all the requirements from our user requirements list (PDF) there is scope for further development and this is continuing in the right direction.


KAPTUR – commencing countdown…

This is our update for KAPTUR for December and January with just over two months of the project left to go!

WP1: Project Management

  • The project team met on the 11th December at Goldsmiths, University of London. This was the first team meeting with the new-in-post UAL Project Officer, Sarah Mahurter, Manager of the University Archives and Special Collections Centre.
  • Just before Christmas the KAPTUR project team were delighted to officially welcome Andrew Gray as the new Goldsmiths Project Officer. Andrew had been able to attend the meeting on 11th December as this was scheduled with his interview for the post. Andrew was previously Project Officer at the University of the Arts London working on the JISC Kultur (2007-09) project.
  • The KAPTUR Steering Group meeting was held on Tuesday 8th January and included interactive sessions on sustainability and benefits arising from the project. Presentations and the worksheets are available from: http://www.slideshare.net/kaptur_mrd/tag/steering-group
  • The project team will be meeting in London next week to review the development of the KAPTUR toolkits.

WP3: Technical Infrastructure

  • The Technical Manager has been in contact with Joss Winn, Project Manager of the University of Lincoln’s Orbital project about their work with CKAN. A meeting is scheduled for this month in Lincoln but may now have to be ‘virtual’ due to adverse weather conditions.
  • The Technical Manager has also been in contact with Mark Wainwright from the Open Knowledge Foundation regarding CKAN and a meeting was held in London on Tuesday 8th January.
  • The Technical Manager has received feedback from all the Project Officers regarding CKAN and along with previous feedback this will inform a case study on the technical aspects of the KAPTUR project.
  • The IT Costs document produced by Carlos is now publicly available (following testing at the four institutions): http://www.slideshare.net/kaptur_mrd/kaptur-it-costs-public
  • The Project Officers are currently in the process of uploading visual arts research data to the EPrints pilot system.

WP4: Modelling

  • As previously mentioned, the University of the Arts London policy is available here: http://www.arts.ac.uk/research/data-management/
  • Goldsmiths, University of London have had their policy approved; as senior management advised during the working group discussions, it is an amendment to their existing Records Management policy and is available from: http://www.gold.ac.uk/research-data/
  • The University for the Creative Arts policy requires academic board approval, however it has been made available to all staff via the following link: http://www.ucreative.ac.uk/research_governance
  • The Glasgow School of Art is expected to be approved at their Research and Knowledge Exchange Committee meeting in February.
  • The four policies will be made available through DCC in due course and will also be linked to from the KAPTUR Outputs page.

WP5: Training and Support

  • As mentioned previously, the UAL workshop has been completed – further details and a list of attendees is available here: http://ualrdm-eorg.eventbrite.co.uk/ Presentations are available online here: http://www.slideshare.net/kaptur_mrd/tag/ualrdmtraining
  • The University for the Creative Arts held their workshop last week, including a session looking at definitions of visual arts research data and another session on creating an AHRC Technical Plan. The presentations are available from: http://www.slideshare.net/kaptur_mrd/tag/ucardmtraining
  • The Glasgow School of Art training workshop will take place next week on 31st January with the assistance of Laura Molloy, JISCMRD Evidence Gatherer.
  • In late November, before the previous Goldsmiths Project Officer left, a session was held focusing on the Library’s role in Research, however the official training workshop has been rescheduled. The new Goldsmiths Project Officer, in post from January, will arrange this to take place in early February.
  • Benchmarking feedback is being gathered from participants to each workshop as well as from the Project Officers themselves, this will then lead to refinements of the KAPTUR training plan and also an online training version in the form of the KAPTUR toolkits.

WP6: Evaluation and Sustainability

  • The four case studies from the Project Officers are in draft stage.
  • Following feedback on the KAPTUR Benefit’s slide [produced for the JISCMRD Benefits programme event in Bristol, 29th-30th November] an additional case study will be completed by the Technical Manager. The project team commented that this had been a real benefit to the partner institutions as they wouldn’t have had the resources to do this work themselves without the KAPTUR project.

WP7: Dissemination


KAPTUR thirteen months into the project – (13/18)

This is our update for the end of the thirteenth month of KAPTUR.

WP1: Project Management

  • The whole Project team met on the 13th November at The Glasgow School of Art.
  • Over the last month we have been managing the challenge of two of the four Project Officers resigning from the project. John Murtagh was part-time at University of the Arts London (UAL) and has successfully applied for a full-time role at the University of East London working on their RDM training project (starting on 26th November). Tahani Nadim has been awarded her PhD and has accepted a post-doc position at another institution which will begin in the New Year; interviews with internal candidates are scheduled for December.
  • On 14th November the Project Manager met with colleagues at the UAL, including John’s replacement, Sarah Mahurter, Manager of the University Archives and Special Collections Centre. Betty Woessner, Research Systems and Data Manager, will  work with the DCC on the Institutional Engagement project.

WP3: Technical Infrastructure

  • The Technical Manager attended the JISCMRD programme event, 24th-25th October 2012, Nottingham. It was an opportunity to share the technical work that we have been piloting and also to learn from other projects. Following a presentation from Richard Jones, representing the DataFlow project, and a practical hands-on workshop, there was no resolution to the fact that DataStage is unable to connect with EPrints.
  • The Technical Manager has created a test instance of CKAN as this appears to be a way forward with a stronger case for long term sustainability as well as building on the work of University of Lincoln’s Orbital project.

WP4: Modelling

  • University of the Arts London have reported that their policy does not need to be approved by the Academic Board, so this completes their delivery of WP4: http://www.arts.ac.uk/research/data-management/
  • University for the Creative Arts and Goldsmiths, University of London have had their draft policies approved at the same level as UAL, however these now need to go on to their Academic Boards in January for final approval.
  • The Glasgow School of Art have revised their timescale for the policy due to the recruitment of two key staff who they want to feed into the policy; this is now expected to be approved at their Research and Knowledge Exchange Committee meeting in February. Academic Board approval is not required.
  • The four policies will be made available through DCC in due course (UAL’s policy is already available via the link above).

WP5: Training and Support

  • The first KAPTUR training workshop was held at UAL on Monday 19th November, with support from Marieke Guy and Joy Davidson from the DCC (due to the Institutional Engagement work). Further details and a list of attendees is available here: http://ualrdm-eorg.eventbrite.co.uk/ Presentations are available online here: http://slidesha.re/QTrHcs http://slidesha.re/SnzvBL http://slidesha.re/QnwQIq
  • The further three KAPTUR training workshops are scheduled as follows: 27th November (Goldsmiths) with follow-up in January; 30th November (GSA) with follow-up in January; 16th January (UCA).
  • Feedback is being gathered from participants to each workshop as well as from the Project Officers themselves, this will then lead to refinements of the KAPTUR training plan.
  • The materials used as well as the training plan will be reviewed, re-purposed and re-packaged for use in common Virtual Learning Environments and also for deposit to JORUM. This will form the KAPTUR toolkits.

WP6: Evaluation and Sustainability

  • Two of the four case studies have been completed to very good draft stage. The UAL and Goldsmiths Project Officers were asked to focus on this aspect of the project ahead of schedule in order to capture their knowledge before they leave. Their successors will make any adjustments required.
  • The new UAL Project Officer and the Project Manager are attending the JISCMRD Benefits programme event in Bristol, 29th-30th November.

WP7: Dissemination