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Implementing an open source approach to RDM in the visual arts Research Data Infrastructure for the Visual Arts (RDIVA) Robin Burges, Leigh Garrett, Andrew Gray, Stephanie Mecce, Amy Robinson and Carlos Silva Background The RDIVA consortium comprising four partner institutions (University for the Creative Arts, University of the Arts London, Glasgow College of Art and Goldsmiths University of London) was created following the continuous funding requirement to make publicly funded research data freely available. By its very nature, research in the arts is highly complex and varied, often comprising a wide variety of outputs and formats which present researchers, repository managers and technology teams with many discipline specific issues. Large, complex, multimedia data and datasets are common in the visual arts and humanities; however data is often created and managed by visual arts researchers on a largely ad hoc basis, with few tools available for systematic management. It has been more than 7 years since the RDIVA Partners went on to develop the Kultur Plugin providing a platform to the Arts and Humanities Research sector to display research outputs. The plugin is based on the popular and well established EPrints software and ever since, a series of different EPrints plugins have been developed to meet the needs of the sector and beyond.

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Page 1: Cloud Object Storage | Store & Retrieve Data … › pfigshare-u-files › ...common in the visual arts and humanities; however data is often created and managed by visual arts researchers

Implementing an open source approach to RDM in the visual arts

Research Data Infrastructure for the Visual Arts (RDIVA)

Robin Burges, Leigh Garrett, Andrew Gray, Stephanie Mecce, Amy Robinson and Carlos Silva

Background The RDIVA consortium comprising four partner institutions (University for the Creative Arts, University of the Arts London, Glasgow College of Art and Goldsmiths University of London) was created following the continuous funding requirement to make publicly funded research data freely available. By its very nature, research in the arts is highly complex and varied, often comprising a wide variety of outputs and formats which present researchers, repository managers and technology teams with many discipline specific issues. Large, complex, multimedia data and datasets are common in the visual arts and humanities; however data is often created and managed by visual arts researchers on a largely ad hoc basis, with few tools available for systematic management. It has been more than 7 years since the RDIVA Partners went on to develop the Kultur Plugin providing a platform to the Arts and Humanities Research sector to display research outputs. The plugin is based on the popular and well established EPrints software and ever since, a series of different EPrints plugins have been developed to meet the needs of the sector and beyond.

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Expectations As discussed in previous Jisc projects ‘Visual arts research data presents particular challenges in terms of the diversity and nature of the research area’ (UAL Case Study, Kaptur 2013). This research is frequently non-text based and may comprise artifacts, events, performances, time-based media or interactive software. There can be considerable difficulties storing and archiving such data and making it accessible to the wider research community. The rationale behind the RDIVA partners is to promote the engagement with RDM from the visual research community focusing on visual rather than textual, however the partner institutions also want to provide an RDM framework flexible enough to store and publish large and complex data and datasets. There will need to be a distinction between other types of RDM within the partner institutions and their repositories and it is hoped with this project that we will be able to answer the questions about ‘what metadata to capture and what type of files to support’, etc. Now, building upon experience in previous Jisc funded projects and with the valuable help of CREST (providing an overview picture from other arts and non arts institutions), Arkivum and ULCC (providing technical expertise in development of EPrints tools) the consortium aims at creating a pilot system that works independently regardless of any plugin installed within the RDM System area. It is also expected that an enhanced pilot on discipline-appropriate tools is developed in the next phases of the Jisc Data Spring Project and that further investigation on the challenges and particular sector needs takes place. Approach Part of the reasoning behind this project is trying to reuse existing tools available and developed through similar Jisc funded projects (Recollect, Kultur, Video upload) and make them work together rather than independently, identify the main community needs in terms of workflow and come up with a framework that not only arts and humanities institutions can use but also any visual related institution who wants/needs to collect visual data. This approach will also serve to boost engagement with visual researchers in RDM to collect, publish and preserve complex data and datasets, rather than having these data stored around in memory sticks, dropbox or other non-reliable/non-suitable areas. From previous research performed during the Kaptur project, it was clear that there was no single product that could completely fulfill all the requirements of the arts sector in terms of research data management. This was later ratified by the technical analysis review where three contenders were identified in the first round and a fourth contender at a later stage during the project (Kaptur, 2013). However, because its existing technical and professional community, support, search engine and ease of initial installation and configuration, EPrints was adopted and used already at the partner institutions, and was both graded and ratified by the Project Officers in each partner institution as the most viable option which could fulfill the needs of research data management (Appendix C, Kaptur Technical Analysis report, 2013).

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An open source software such as EPrints is preferred by the RDIVA partners, as well as recommended by the project's funder, JISC given that the institutions already use the software as their institutional repository, it represents a low initial investment and means that adoption by other institutions within the sector is more likely. Whilst open source software has several benefits, it also comes with risks in terms of ongoing development and support. However EPrints on its own has not been a clear-cut winner in previous projects as evaluations by partner institutions demonstrated that other open source tools were as capable to deliver similar results as EPrints. Software explored includes: figshare, DataStage and CKAN, which in some cases fulfilled some of the requirements that the EPrints software is not able to perform, but in others would require additional development work. Over the length of the Jisc Data Spring project, the RDIVA partners together with representatives from CREST and ULCC have organised meetings and online discussions to gather requirements that researchers in the Arts and Humanities sector have in terms of Research Data Management. On May 14th 2015, the RDIVA partners met at the CREST offices in London with the main objective of specifying the particular requirements from the project partners and convert them into a useful set of tool’s specifications, which can be developed in line with the Jisc Data Spring project Phase 2. The meeting was joined by a representative of Royal College of Arts, ULCC and Digirati, which provided expertise in different areas of RDM. Over the meeting a series of issues and possible solutions to address RDM in the visual arts sector were discussed, in particular the clear need of making different tools working together in the same research data management system. Special attention was given to Kultur and MePrints tools working together with the Recollect plugin. To address this issue, the technical team at ULCC developed a fix to the plugin, allowing it to interact with other EPrints plugins without affecting the overall functionality. The fix has been implemented and tested in a pilot setup at http://data.da.ulcc.ac.uk/ and any new development and bug fixes will be made available to the wider community via the EPrints plugin repository (a.k.a. EPrints Bazaar). Also, following on from discussions, it became imperative that repository metadata for the visual arts community has not been revised since its launch with the Kultur project by EPrints. Therefore it was agreed that each partner institutions will map against the current workflow process the fields that have been used over the last 7 years (since the adoption of Kultur) and at the same time a mapping outlining the workflow required for Research Data Management systems was going to be draw down. This work will provide the foundations for Phase 2 when a pilot with the Recollect plugin including specific Visual Arts fields will be implemented. Following on the workshop and in order to promote, disseminate and engage the community, the RDIVA team decided to present a poster at the CERN Workshop on Innovations in Scholarly Communication (OAI9) in Geneva Switzerland. The overall project was received with very positive reviews and the European Library and Research communities were pleased to see improvements in Research Data Management in the Visual Arts.

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Conclusions and Recommendations The challenges of this project have been the vast amount of coordination and logistics to accommodate a consortium as varied as ours. However, directly or indirectly, each institution has worked together in the past either as consultant, a service provider or part of a another consortium. For the RDIVA Partners, it was very important to maintain specific requirements previously outlined in the first round of projects. The research around metadata fields of its current repository as well as the correct development work and bug fixes of the ReCollect and MePrints plugins were highly important. Finally, the standardization and simplification of content across the sector allowed that any future implementation and modification of the core software will not affect the specific plugins designed to collect RDM in the Visual Arts. The RDIVA Partners have subsequently engaged in a dialogue with the Technical Experts at ULCC in order to identify the main parts of development work needed for Phase 2. This being in the following order:

1. ReCollect Data Mapping Looking at a simplified and standard ‘out of the box’ data mapping fields for the collection of research data in the Visual Arts.

2. Arts Configuration Switch Enabling arts institutions to have a ‘switch’ within the settings of the ReCollect plugin that allows the with metadata fields design to change to a Visual Arts like version.

3. Bootstrap Integration

Bringing EPrints designs to an up to date visual version. Enhancements will include but are not limited to: icons, buttons and text fonts and formats.

4. Universal Plugin Integration

This will include work in the presentation and display of research content in a visual manner, allowing different types of multimedia content to be reproduced with ease.

The proposed arrangements will include hosting for up to a year, development of EPrints Bazaar Plugin(s) as appropriate and consultancy work to accommodate any particular details and style issues presented during Phase 2. In overall, this project has raised the sector specific issues of Research Data Management in the Visual Arts and other sectors and fields covered by the Data Spring Jisc Programme. It is expected that a Phase 2 will provide a much wider impact and usefulness to the community and that its benefits to the sector will be appreciated and highlighted in the years to come. References Garrett, L. et al., 2012. JISC funded KAPTUR project environmental assessment report. Available from: http://www.research.ucreative.ac.uk/1054 [Accessed 8 July 2015].

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Garrett, L., Gramstadt, M. and Spalding, A. (2012) Research Data Management (RDM) discussion paper. Available from: http://www.slideshare.net/KAPTUR_mrd/research-data-management-rdmdiscussion-paper [Accessed 9 July 2015]. Garrett, L., Silva, S., and Gramstadt, M., 2012. Kaptur Technical Analysis Report. Available from: http://vads.ac.uk/kaptur/outputs/Kaptur_technical_analysis.pdf [Accessed 5 July 2015]. KAPTUR, 2012. Examples of publicly funded projects in the visual arts. Available from: http://www.slideshare.net/KAPTUR_mrd/funded-projects [Accessed 3 July 2015]. Hancox, E., Mahurter, S. and Murtagh, J. (2013) Research Data Management at the University of the Arts London. Available from: http://vads.ac.uk/kaptur/outputs/UAL2013.pdf [Accessed 1 July 2015] University of Southampton. EPrints. Available from: http://www.eprints.org [Accessed 9 July 2015]. University of Southampton (2007-9). Kultur Project. Available from: http://kultur.eprints.org [Accessed 1 July 2015]. Contact Carlos Silva Programme Manager Centre for Digital Scholarship University for the Creative Arts [email protected]