KAPTUR conference, London, March 2013
Posted: March 7, 2013 Filed under: events | Tags: CKAN, EPrints, jiscmrd, RDM policies, technical analysis, ukdcc Leave a commentKAPTUR – one month to go…
Posted: March 2, 2013 Filed under: monthly reports, project posts | Tags: CKAN, EPrints, jiscmrd, RDM policies, ukdcc Leave a commentThis 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
- The Project Director attended the Reskilling for RDM workshop at University of the West of England on 29th January
- The Technical Manager attended the CKAN workshop in London on 18th February – a blog post is available: https://kaptur.wordpress.com/2013/03/02/ckan4rdm-workshop/
- The Technical Manager also attended the Research Data Management Storage Requirements Workshop in London on 25th February: http://rdm-storage.eventbrite.co.uk/ This was hosted by JISC, DCC and JANET.
- On Monday 4th March, Lynda Agili, Head of Research Office, and Andrew Gray, the KAPTUR Project Officer, both from Goldsmiths, University of London will present at an ARMA event.
- The KAPTUR end-of-project conference will take place on Wednesday 6th March. It is fully booked: http://kapturmrd.eventbrite.co.uk/
Reflections on the 8th International Digital Curation Conference
Posted: January 30, 2013 Filed under: events | Tags: idcc13, jiscmrd, ukdcc Leave a commentWith thanks to Emma Hancox, Assistant Archivist, University of the Arts London for this blog post.
From Tuesday 15th to Wednesday 16th January I attended the 8th International Digital Curation Centre Conference in Amsterdam entitled ‘Infrastructure, Intelligence, Innovation: driving the Data Science agenda.’ The conference was an invaluable opportunity to learn from the research data management experience of professionals from a range of different countries and backgrounds. Here I will draw on highlights of most relevance to the KAPTUR project, however an overview of the full conference including presentation slides is available on the Digital Curation Centre website as are videos of some of the talks.
Day One: Tuesday 15th January
‘Growing an Institution’s Research Data Management Capability through Strategic Investments in Infrastructure’, Anthony Beitz, Monash eResearch Centre.
The key message I took from this talk was Antony’s call to ‘adopt, adapt and develop’, in essence look at solutions that already exist and develop them. Anthony advocated going out into the research community to see what solutions researchers already use within their communities as they tend to be more loyal to their research community than their institution. He also emphasised that a lot of the work has already been done for us; we can use Facebook for marketing, Twitter for customer service and we can adapt a range of open source software to meet our needs.
‘Building Services, Building Communities, Supporting Data Intensive Research’ Patricia Cruse, Director, University of California Curation Centre.
Patricia Cruse emphasised the importance of researcher engagement as early as possible in the digital curation lifecycle. She gave two very useful pieces of advice; ‘start small’ with a simple solution that can be built upwards when more complex problems are met and employ flexible solutions that can be adapted to diverse situations. UCC has a number of tools to assist researchers such as UC3Merritt (for the management, archiving and sharing of digital content) and the Web Archiving Service which allows researchers to capture, analyse and archive websites used in the course of their research. More information is available on the UCC website.
Minute Madness
The minute madness session gave poster demonstrators one minute to encourage delegates to view them and vote for them! Many posters represented projects of interest to KAPTUR and I enjoyed wandering around and exploring the display later in the afternoon. Posters of interest included ‘Creating an Online Training Module on Research Data Management for the University of Bath’ (training in research data management is something that KAPTUR project partners will certainly need to consider in the future) and the poster for IMEJI an open source software tool from Germany providing free storage, sharing and metadata creation for audiovisual content which I can see being of use in a visual arts research data context.
Day Two: Wednesday 16th January
‘Institutional Research Data Management’
On the second day I chose from a programme of parallel sessions. In the morning I learnt about the journeys professionals from the Universities of Bath, Edinburgh, Nottingham and Oxford had been on to create, implement and improve research data management capabilities in their institutions. Amongst much useful information I learnt that The University of Edinburgh has created MANTRA, an online learning module available under an open license so it can be rebranded and used by others. Thomas Parsons from the University of Nottingham commented that researchers typically store their data in five places. This emphasised to me the need for research data management training and the value of training modules such as MANTRA. From surveying researchers James Wilson from the University of Oxford found that types of data he had expected to be in a minority, were actually used more frequently than expected. I wondered whether we could also expect this with visual arts research data.
‘Arts and Humanities Research Data’
In the afternoon there was a chance to hear about Arts and Humanities Research Data and an overview of KAPTUR was given by Carlos Silva from the University of the Creative Arts. Following this Marieke Guy gave a presentation entitled ‘Pinning it Down: towards a practical definition of ‘Research Data’ for Creative Arts Institutions.’ This talk discussed work done by the DCC in collaboration with UAL to explore the nature of visual arts research data. Marieke reflected on the fact that whilst there is much consensus on research data in the sciences, this is lacking in the visual arts. Research has suggested that arts researchers do not tend to find the term ‘research data’ useful and find ideas such as ‘documenting the research process’ more useful. She suggested that a definition would be useful, but adopting a scientific vocabulary for the arts can be problematic.
The talks about Arts and Humanities Research Data were the last I was able to attend before I left the conference and ending on this note proved useful for reflecting on the conference in terms of the KAPTUR project. What I felt I took away from IDCC 2013 was that there is much that can be gained from projects at other universities and also a range of existing tools that can be developed and adapted to make life easier. In the visual arts environment, however, we need to continue to think about how research data can be defined since it doesn’t necessarily fit into the same categories as data at other Universities I heard from at IDCC. We also need to tailor solutions to our own unique context.
KAPTUR – commencing countdown…
Posted: January 23, 2013 Filed under: monthly reports, project posts | Tags: AHRC, CKAN, DCC Roadshows, DMP Online, idcc13, jiscmrd, project conference, steering group, ukdcc Leave a commentThis 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
- The Glasgow School of Art Project Officer presented about RDM and the KAPTUR project at the DCC Roadshow, University of Dundee, 5-6th December 2012.
- Last week Emma Hancox from University for the Arts London attended the IDCC13 conference in place of The Glasgow School of Art Project Officer.
- The IDCC13 poster is available here: http://www.slideshare.net/kaptur_mrd/idcc13-kapturposterlowres and the accompanying Minute Madness slide is available here: http://www.slideshare.net/kaptur_mrd/idcc13-kapturminutemadness
- The Technical Manager presented a paper at IDCC13, additionally he mentioned the IT Costs Model which is available here: http://www.slideshare.net/kaptur_mrd/kaptur-it-costs-public
- The KAPTUR end-of-project conference will be held on Wednesday 6th March and more information and booking is available here: http://kapturmrd.eventbrite.co.uk/
KAPTUR thirteen months into the project – (13/18)
Posted: November 29, 2012 Filed under: monthly reports, project posts | Tags: CKAN, DataCite, jiscmrd, Orbital, RDM policies, rdmf9, ukdcc Leave a commentThis 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
- Both the IDCC13 paper and poster proposals were successful.
- The Technical Manager presented at the JISCMRD programme event on 24th October, Nottingham (Carlos’ presentation). The Project Manager also presented a poster (available with audio explanation here) and was part of the Selecting and Appraising Research Data session on 25th October (blog post).
- Jacqueline Cooke attended the RDM Training workshop on 26th October (blog post).
- Anne Spalding attended the DataCite workshop ‘Managing Sensitive Data’ on 29th October (blog post).
- Carlos Silva attended the RDM Forum ‘Shaping the infrastructure’, 14th-15th November (blog post).