Kaptur – three months into the project (1/6)
Posted: January 6, 2012 Filed under: monthly reports, project posts | Tags: DCC Roadshows, environmental assessment, idcc11, JISC Incremental, jiscmrd, start-up Leave a commentOne sixth of the way through Kaptur, and this is our update for the third month:
1. Project Outputs
- consortium agreement – in process of being signed (delays due to Christmas, this is now expected before the end of January)
2. Environmental Assessment
- The 16 one-hour recorded interviews have now been transcribed. Each Project Officer has been reviewing the transcripts, marking them up and checking that they are anonymised in order to collaboratively analyse on Monday 9th and Tuesday 10th January 2012.
3. Dissemination
- Robin Burgess is working on the new EPrints institutional repository for the Glasgow School of Art (presentation to be given at JISC RTE event in February). This is very useful for Kaptur both in terms of the relationships that Robin has already been building and as it will mean that all four institutional partners will then have ‘kulturised’ EPrints repositories for research outputs. This may have an impact on decisions to be made by the Technical Manager regarding the research data management system.
- John Murtagh wrote a blog post for DCC, this is available here: An arts perspective: day two and three – the sixth DCC Roadshow on data management and also attended Drawing: Interpretation / Translation at University of the Arts London
- Tahani Nadim began work on Defiant Objects which “will produce a guide and recommendations for supporting non-standard deposits (“defiant objects”) in institutional repositories”, this is also one to watch for Kaptur as we are already looking at areas of potential overlap between ‘research data’ and ‘research objects’ in the creative arts
- Anne Spalding attended the IDCC Workshops and wrote blog posts on delivering post-graduate research data management training and data re-use (how can metadata stimulate re-use?). A meeting was held with the UCA Research Office, and the Project CAiRO training module was promoted.
- Project Manager attended the 7th International Digital Curation Conference and gave a ‘minute madness’ presentation on Kaptur, blog post available about the poster.
- The Kultivate project held its final workshop on Linked Data, which included a short presentation on Kaptur. A Storify of the event is available.
4. Issues/challenges
December is always a challenging month (due to leave and tying up loose ends) which is why we pressed ahead with the project work so quickly during October and November. During December we continued to build links with other projects, the DCC, and internationally at the IDCC conference. The biggest issue was making sure everything was in place for the data analysis to occur in early January including the transcripts and venue. We will be meeting at Goldsmiths, University of London and a blog post will follow here regarding our analysis.
#jiscmrd programme launch – Commonalities
Posted: December 15, 2011 Filed under: events, project posts | Tags: CARDIO, DAF, DMP Online, JISC Incremental, jiscmrd, programme launch, Project CAiRO, start-up Leave a commentSimon Hodson, JISCMRD Programme Manager, has asked all projects to do a short blog post about commonalities.
View from the National College for School Leadership, Nottingham. Photo: MTG
Kaptur has previously highlighted the commonalities with the first round of JISCMRD programme funding (2009-11) and how we plan to use training materials produced by Project CAiRO and also have spent time looking at JISC Incremental. The commonalities identified so far from the JISCMRD Programme launch are:
1. Disciplinary
The session on the last day put a few of the projects together in an ‘Arts and Humanities’ group. Some of the projects that are particularly relevant to us are:
- data.bris – Simon Price, Project Manager and Stephen Gray, Digital Projects Support Officer (formerly Project CAiRO Project Manager)
- Sustainable Management of Digital Music Research Data – similar approach to us with their interviews
- iridium – covering a range of subject areas including the arts
- REWARD – a six month project at UCL (Archaeology)
- Research Data @Essex
2. Pilot infrastructure
Kaptur is one of 17 projects in Strand A of the JISCMRD programme (Simon Hodson’s blog post on this) – we are therefore seeking to both learn lessons from more experienced projects in this strand (who had previous JISCMRD funding or links) and also find out how similar pilot projects are approaching things.
- Managing Research Data: a pilot study in Health and Life Sciences – a pilot project at University of the West of England (UWE are also a member of the Kultur II Group and have a ‘kulturised’ EPrints research repository!)
- DataFlow – keeping an eye on Data Management Rollout at Oxford (DaMaRO) – although DataFlow is in the ‘Cloud’ there does also appear to be an option to have a local Web server.
- SWORD-ARM – SWORD & Archaeological Research data Management
3. Approach
- During the Programme Launch there was a lot of talk about DCC tools including DMP Online, DAF, and CARDIO – look out for a future blog post about our environmental assessment methodology.
- Also keen to learn lessons from the MaDAM project, which is now MiSS (MaDAM into Sustainable Service) – http://www.miss.manchester.ac.uk/ (great URL!)
- Research360@Bath looks good too!
Please let me know if I have overlooked any projects that are relevant to Kaptur – we are interested in engaging with other projects and welcome feedback!
Links
- JISCMRD02-Commonalities Google spreadsheet
- Google Reader “Research data management” bundle created by Jez Cope
Kaptur – two months into the project
Posted: December 7, 2011 Filed under: monthly reports, project posts | Tags: environmental assessment, jiscmrd, start-up, steering group 1 CommentThe following blog post is based on a report submitted to Simon Hodson, JISCMRD Programme Manager:
1. Project Outputs
- consortium agreement produced – in process of being signed
- roles and responsibilities document produced and discussed verbally with each party
- steering group meeting arranged for 6th February 2012 – agenda and terms of reference circulated
2. Environmental Assessment
- Project Officers have now carried out 16 one-hour recorded interviews, this data is currently being transcribed and analysed. The marked-up transcripts will then be analysed collaboratively across the project team at our next meeting in early January, before we publish our findings in the Environmental Assessment report. Our interview methodology has been briefly mentioned in previous blog posts, but we will make it properly available soon for use and re-use.
3. Dissemination
- Kaptur banner/poster produced
- Project Officers are building relationships in each institution, Kaptur has been raised at Research Office and departmental meetings; contact has been made with the four high level project sponsors.
- Project Officers: Robin Burgess had previously spoken at the DCC Roadshow in Glasgow; Tahani Nadim attended Day 1 of the DCC Roadshow in Cambridge; John Murtagh attended the whole of the DCC Roadshow in Cambridge (blog post to be published via DCC); Anne Spalding attended the Repositories Support Project Autumn School
- Project Manager and Technical Manager attended the JISCMRD Programme launch in Nottingham
- Project Manager attended: Intellectual Property Rights and Digital Preservation, 21st November 2011; and The Future of Arts Research, 18th November 2011
- Project Director and Project Manager attended UCA Research Supervisor Training, 16th-17th November 2011
4. Issues/challenges
The main focus of November was to spend time finding out what is happening elsewhere through attending events and making inroads into the four partner institutions internally. As we are a collaborative project, it is really important that we share information as widely as possible – hence the long blog posts – but hopefully still digestible with links and headings etc. We aim to make as much of the project as open as possible. Challenges this month were in terms of ensuring that the interviews could be carried out (support and engagement) and also establishing the date for the steering group meeting.
Kaptur – one month into the project
Posted: November 11, 2011 Filed under: monthly reports, project posts | Tags: environmental assessment, jiscmrd, start-up 1 CommentThe following blog post is based on a report submitted to Simon Hodson, JISCMRD Programme Manager, on Friday 4th November:
1. Project Outputs
- project web page template completed
- project documentation completed (this will be made available via our outputs page very soon)
- project blog: https://kaptur.wordpress.com
- project website: http://vads.ac.uk/kaptur
2. Additional Outputs
- Project Officers carried out 8 probing interviews, a report is available
from Tahani Nadim, Goldsmiths, University of London, here:
http://www.slideshare.net/kaptur_mrd/kaptur-interviews-goldsmiths-university-of-london
The purpose of the interviews was to inform the environmental assessment. - A Kaptur Google calendar was created in order to provide a central location for project activities, this will include the workpackage dates soon. It currently includes events we are attending.
- A SlideShare account was created because this is a good way to record impact and disseminate project outputs.
- John Murtagh, University of the Arts London Project Officer, created a Kaptur Facebook page again to try and maximise our dissemination networks.
3. Dissemination
- Press release via JISCMail lists
- Press release via lead institution’s website and via press contacts
- Press releases at each individual institution customised with quotes from their senior management
- Blog posts and tweets
- Project Director visit to DCC and EDiNA
- Project Manager visit to attend RDMF7
4. Issues/challenges
It is very positive that we did not need to recruit anyone in order to form the Project Team, however we have had to spend the past month trying to clarify roles and responsibilities with the regard to the number of days that each of us are working on Kaptur and also considering how this work relates to other duties and how we can maximise our resources that way.
Methodology for the Environmental Assessment
Posted: October 18, 2011 Filed under: meetings | Tags: environmental assessment, JISC Incremental, jiscmrd, start-up 3 Comments
'Newton' after William Blake, Eduardo Paolozzi, 1995, British Library, London. Photo: VADS
Yesterday members of the KAPTUR project team met at the British Library to discuss the methodology for the environmental assessment. Following previous email discussions and telephone chats by the end of the meeting we had agreed on the following approach:
- There were elements of the JISC Incremental project’s scoping study (PDF) that we could re-use e.g. their approach with having semi-structured interviews, and the cross-departmental comparison of data gathering across the institutional partners.
- However there were also elements of the study that may not be appropriate e.g. the interview questions. As part of our problem space we are trying to uncover ‘What is arts research data?’ and ‘what are the issues?’ and we do not want to be too proscriptive at least initially.
- Each Project Officer will now organise informal interviews with visual arts researchers to gather initial views and issues that will inform our themes for the main data gathering exercise.
- We have arranged to meet again on Monday 31st October when the Project Officers will present their findings to the group.
A note: the role of the environmental assessment in the KAPTUR project is to underpin both the modelling and technical stages which are the main body of the work KAPTUR is undertaking. It is hoped that in carrying out the environmental assessment the four Project Officers will build up relationships that will feed and sustain the work of the project after the end of the project; and that the themes and issues that are raised can be addressed during KAPTUR.
KAPTUR 