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 – five months into the project

This is our update for the end of the fifth month:

WP1: Project Management

  • consortium agreement – waiting for the fourth institution to sign
  • steering group meeting held (presentations available on SlideShare), minutes circulated, blog post

WP2: Environmental Assessment

  • as reported previously, this phase is completed, although it is also feeding into the Technical Infrastructure phase
  • environmental assessment report – this has gone through a series of iterations and we have received very positive feedback; it will be available from early next week to download: UCA Research Online
  • the implementation plan was part of the original draft, and presented at the Steering Group meeting, but was then removed for clarity, and will now be made available as a series of blog posts this week

WP3: Technical Infrastructure

  • The Technical Manager has met and interviewed IT staff from three institutions.
  • In addition the four Project Officers have been involved in providing feedback on the technical requirements originating from the 16 interviews with visual arts researchers (from the Environmental Assessment phase).
  • Last week the first draft of the Technical Analysis report was sent to the Principal Investigator and Co-Investigator.
  • The Technical Manager is installing DataBank and DataStage for requirements testing and comparison with other software.

WP4: Modelling

  • The Project Officers have been contacting and meeting a range of stakeholders from across their institutions, and also working with the Project Sponsors.
  • One institution has established a working group which will meet every 4-6 weeks; another institution has established a working group due to meet in early April.
  • The other two institutions are in the process of forming their working groups, including identifying relevant stakeholders.

WP7: Dissemination

4. Issues/challenges

The past month was about transition, so there were a variety of challenges!

The environmental assessment report was drafted last month, but following the Steering Group meeting it went through a series of iterations which took longer than expected, and it has also been verified by the 16 interviewees.

The relationships built up during WP2: Environmental Assessment are leading into WPs 3 and 4; however as we are in the process of getting the working groups together this is naturally throwing up a lot of questions and queries from all parties.

The Project Sponsors have been very engaged with Kaptur and they have been working closely with the Project Officers.

All Project Officers, and the Technical Manager, have now attended the excellent Digital Curation Centre (DCC) Roadshows. This has provided us with a solid base to move onwards with the aims of Kaptur, however the next challenge is to grow that same awareness amongst the stakeholders at each institution. The following DCC Research data policy briefing (PDF) document is being used as a starting point for discussion for WP4: Modelling. This was discovered through a DCC blog post by Sarah Jones (December 2011).


Kaptur Steering Group Meeting, 6th February 2012

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.


Kaptur – four months into the project

This is our update for the end of the fourth month:

1. Project Outputs

  • consortium agreement – this has been signed by 3 out of 4 institutions (so nearly there!)
  • environmental assessment report – a draft version is available which will be published and promoted very soon

2. Environmental Assessment

  • This workpackage is now complete.

3. Technical Infrastructure

  • The Kaptur Technical Manager has written a methodology for the Technical Analysis report.
  • Meetings will be arranged very soon with key stakeholders at each institution.

4. Dissemination

  • This has been a relatively quiet month in terms of attending events, although Robin Burgess was part of the 7th Emergy Conference and his abstract, which is about applying Emergy accountancy to arts related data, is available from SlideShare.
  • The Kaptur Project Director submitted two conference abstracts.
  • The Project Officers have been working collaboratively in Google Docs to write up the Environmental Assessment report; our methodology is available on SlideShare as is the final version of our questionnaire.
  • The Project Manager has been working on the report and with the Project Officers and Technical Manager, also liaising with the Kaptur Steering Group in order to ensure that everything is in place for the first meeting on Monday 6th February 2012.

4. Issues/challenges

The focus this past month has been on analysing the data from the 16 interviews as well as writing the Environmental Assessment report. As part of this process the project team have been considering the research data that we ourselves have been creating. A blog post on this will be forthcoming.

The Technical Manager has begun work on the Kaptur project, and brings with him experience of managing and working on other visual arts projects. The project team have been thinking about how the work on the environmental assessment can be turned into reality with policies and technical infrastructure, as these are the next tasks to be tackled.


visual arts research data and ‘creation’

The first Kaptur Steering Group meeting will be held on Monday 6th February at University for the Creative Arts in Farnham. The Project Officers and Project Manager will present findings from the Environmental Assessment Report, which we will disseminate following feedback from the Group.

V & A Museum, London

Dale Chihuly's V&A Rotunda chandelier. Photo: MTG

The following quote is not in our report, but it does resonate with some of our own findings. It is taken originally from text on display in the Theatre and Performance Galleries at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. However credit is due to Katie of the JE SUIS UNE MONSTRE blog for making this available online:

“The process of creation differs from artist to artist but always springs from the premise that something must, could, or should be created.

Artists take inspiration from everywhere – literature, landscape, advertising, other works of art, political and historical events – so the process of creation and inspiration is cyclical.”

The blog also shows examples of visual arts research data as part of a ‘conversation with Amber Hards‘, a Knitwear Designer.