Institutional Repositories for Creative and Applied Arts Research: The Kultur Project

Digital repositories are playing an increasingly significant role within Higher Education Institutions as a means of managing and promoting research activity. However, there remain substantial disciplinary differences in take up, and the research activity of the visual and applied arts community is notably under-represented. There are both technical and cultural reasons for this absence. Perhaps most obviously, institutional repositories have traditionally been tailored towards text-based outputs, and so have been less proficient at accommodating the more complex multimedia outputs associated with practice-led research. In addition, the specific working practices of arts researchers and their mediation between academic and professional art worlds tends to influence IPR needs and attitudes towards Open Access. Such factors all need to be engaged with in order to develop an effective model of an arts repository that is useful to this sector.
This article will outline the work done by the JISC-funded Kultur project to address these needs. Kultur is a collaboration between the University of Southampton, the University of the Arts London, University for the Creative Arts and VADS, and has been funded as part of JISC’s 2007-2009 Repositories and Preservation Programme. In establishing two new IRs for UAL and UCA, and enhancing Southampton’s existing repository, the project has produced a transferable model of a multimedia repository for arts-based research outputs. The project approach has been strongly user-driven, and the article summarises how enhancements to eprints software have been shaped by the findings of an extensive user analysis. This comprised an online survey of target users, one-to-one follow-up interviews with researchers, and usability tests of the Kultur demonstrator repository. On the policy side, the article also describes the processes of developing an appropriate metadata schema, IPR policy, and institutional policies for embedding the repository. Finally, the article will consider future development, and the scope for building on the findings of the Kultur project for the benefit of the wider arts community.

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