KAPTUR Steering Group meeting, HEFCE, 18th July

Posted: July 26, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: meetings, technical, training | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

View from HEFCE, 12th Floor,
Centre Point, London. Photo: MTG

Key points from the meeting:

  • It was noted that there was diversity among the four institutions in terms of drafting the RDM policies – we can still collaborate and learn from each other – but the approach is necessarily different at each institution.
  • University of the Arts London are really benefiting from their participation in the DCC University Engagement programme; the UAL Project Officer is working an extra day per week on this and as a result has been able to revisit and extend the KAPTUR Environmental Assessment through 20 x 5 minute telephone calls which will be followed up with 1 hour in-depth interviews with visual arts researchers.
  • There was discussion about a definition for visual arts research data and how this might be constraining, but was needed at the same time in order to be able to move forward with the RDM policies. A working definition was presented to the KAPTUR Steering Group 3 months ago in response to questions raised by the UAL working group: http://www.slideshare.net/kaptur_mrd/kaptur-news06
  • Feedback on training/support and the KAPTUR toolkits: recommendation to create KAPTUR videos about visual arts research data instead of hosting workshops at each institution (we already had plans to re-use content from the previous JISCMRD programme e.g. http://www.youtube.com/user/GUdatamanagement). I still think the face-to-face aspect of the workshops would be useful, but maybe there is a way to incorporate shorter sessions and use the videos as part of these? We will discuss at our next project team meeting in September.
  • The Steering Group liked the Figshare interface and thought it would be appealing to visual arts researchers as well as easy to use; there were lots of questions about both DataStage and Figshare.
  • Feedback on Sustainability: recommendation to get an idea of costs of the proposed technical infrastructure to include estimates of staff time required for ongoing support of the systems.

The presentations are available from SlideShare.

The Triumphal Quadriga or Horses of St Mark, facade of St Mark’s Basilica in Venice.
Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license

It was great to welcome Laura Molloy, Researcher at the Humanities Advanced Technology and Information Institute (HATII), to the Steering Group meeting. After the meeting Leigh, Laura and I met to discuss the project from the perspective of her role as JISCMRD Evidence Gatherer. As well as discussing impact and gathering evidence about benefits, Laura also came up with the concept of the chariot (KAPTUR project) being pulled by four horses (our four institutions). I really liked this idea of the race and also the need for collaboration to be well-matched in order to make the project successful.

Kaptur Steering Group Meeting, 6th February 2012

Posted: February 11, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: meetings | Tags: , , , , | Leave a comment

On Monday we held our first Kaptur Steering Group meeting at the University for the Creative Arts, Farnham. This was followed up with a meeting with Simon Hodson, JISCMRD Programme Manager in the afternoon. There are a lot of action points to follow up from both meetings and further blog posts will follow on some of these.

The presentations given on Monday are available from the Kaptur SlideShare page. As mentioned during the meeting, we are using SlideShare as a way to generate altmetrics for the project and also to ensure ease of access to outputs from Kaptur.

At the Steering Group meeting we were delighted to welcome high-level senior management and Project Sponsors from all four institutions; they were so engaged with Kaptur and keen to get involved to promote the project which was wonderful. Earlier this week I followed up one of the action points from the meeting which was to create a one-side Word document with headlines about Kaptur tailored particularly to the Project Sponsors role. This is to enable them to promote Kaptur more effectively within their institutions. [NB: The Steering Group members had previously received key points in terms of their roles and responsibilities, and the purpose of each steering group meeting when they were invited to join the Steering Group in October. This was followed up with a Steering Group Terms of Reference document a couple of months prior to the meeting.]

Simon Hodson recommended sending the Steering Group members a separate monthly lightweight report i.e. targeted to their needs as opposed to the report sent to Simon and blogged about overall project progress.

This week the Project Officers have been moving onto the next stage of the project – the modelling and technical workpackages – which run parallel and will involve the setting up of working groups at each institution to inform and support these stages. The working groups will continue to build on existing relationships established through the environmental assessment, as well as draw in the full spectrum of stakeholders i.e. IT, Library, Research Office, Researchers etc. The Kaptur Technical Manager has also been setting up meetings with IT at each institution as part of the work he is doing on the Technical Analysis.