The recording and indexing of research plays a vital role in how it can be found and used, but what happens when the output from a research project is not a written document, but a performance, series of events or an artistic work? This blog post discusses findings from two AHRC-funded scoping projects exploring how these forms of practice research can be better documented and made more accessible to researchers and research users by libraries and archives: PRVoices: Practice Research Voices (University of Westminster) and SPARKLE: Sustaining Practice Assets for Research, Knowledge, Learning and Education (University of Leeds)

Evans, J.

Ranger, H.

Vials Moore, A.

White Rose Research Online

This is a repository copy of A DOI is not enough – can practice research be captured by libraries and archives?.White Rose Research Online URL for this paper:https://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/214374/Version: Published VersionOther:Ranger, H. orcid.org/0000-0002-8802-4589, Evans, J. and Vials Moore, A. (2024) A DOI is not enough – can practice research be captured by libraries and archives? LSE Impact Blog. eprints@whiterose.ac.ukhttps://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/Reuse This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) licence. This licence allows you to distribute, remix, tweak, and build upon the work, even commercially, as long as you credit the authors for the original work. More information and the full terms of the licence here: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/ Takedown If you consider content in White Rose Research Online to be in breach of UK law, please notify us by emailing eprints@whiterose.ac.uk including the URL of the record and the reason for the withdrawal request. 1/4July 2, 2024A DOI is not enough – Can practice research be capturedby libraries and archives?blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2024/07/02/a-doi-is-not-enough-can-practice-research-be-captured-by-libraries-and-archives/The recording and indexing of research plays a vital role in how it can be found and used,but what happens when the output from a research project is not a written document, but aperformance, series of events or an artistic work? Holly Ranger, Jenny Evans and AdamVials Moore discuss findings from a series of projects exploring how these forms of practiceresearch can be better documented and made more accessible to researchers and researchusers.Discussions around open standards for scholarly communication have primarily focused ondocumenting and disseminating text-based ‘traditional’ forms of research: a single static PDFor a quantitative dataset that retrospectively captures a research process. As a result,existing open standards and infrastructure do not adequately reflect the forms of researchwhere outputs are more diverse in form, or where the knowledge created is embodied in theactivity of research (or practice) over time, rather than in a single document.‘Practice research’ is ‘an umbrella term that describes all manners of research wherepractice is the significant method of research conveyed in a research output’. The researchelement can be embodied in the work or in the representation of the work, or, it may need2/4articulating using a research narrative. Practice research includes research conductedthrough practice in disciplines as varied as art, architecture, dance, and music, as well aseducation, and health and social care, and each of which may have ‘numerous discipline-specific formulations of practice research’.‘Practice research’ is ‘an umbrella term that describes all manners of research wherepractice is the significant method of research conveyed in a research output’.Through 2022, the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) funded the PracticeResearch Voices (PR Voices) project to explore and define how existing tools and standardscould more effectively support practice research, advancing an infrastructure that enablesthis research to be more accessible, valued, and impactful. This work, alongside the findingsof the AHRC funded Sustaining Practice Assets for Research, Knowledge Learning andEducation (SPARKLE) project, with whom we collaborated, highlights how enhancing thediscovery and re-use of practice research, and enabling an ecosystem that recognises andvalues a diverse range of contributions and contributors, brings benefits to the entirescholarly communications landscape.Practice research outputs are often multi-component, dynamic, and include text and non-textfiles that are added to and/or change over time. These outputs can be disseminated andhosted in several places, such as personal websites, institutional repositories, andcommercial video-sharing platforms. Consequently, these components need to beaggregated in a way that maintains the context between them and which documents orevidences the research narrative. Practice research also produces non-tangible researchevents, such as live performances, which are not only time-based and ephemeral, but whichfundamentally change their form in being captured as an output. In addition, the concept ofcontributorship for these outputs is much broader than ‘authorship’, and includescollaborators who might be curators, videographers, or choreographers, as well asparticipants invited to join co-creation activities.the concept of contributorship for these outputs is much broader than ‘authorship’, andincludes collaborators who might be curators, videographers, or choreographers, aswell as participants invited to join co-creation activities.These factors pose a significant challenge to the capture, preservation, and reuse of practiceresearch within existing scholarly communications infrastructure. While customiseddescriptions of research in institutional repositories might capture a variety of creativepractice output types, this detail is lost when these specialised descriptions fail to match withexisting standardized ways to describe research. And while the concepts of ‘collection’ and‘version’ have become common with the advent of data repositories, their existingcharacterisations do not adequately express the relationships between practice research’saggregated and updated objects.3/4Practice Research Voices was a collaboration between information professionals andpractice researchers, led by the University of Westminster, with partners at Jisc, King’sCollege London, and the British Library, and software developers at Westminster’s repositoryplatform, Haplo (now Cayuse). Building on Westminster’s development of their institutionalrepository to better represent creative practice research in art and design, the repositoriesworkstream of the project expressed this enhanced underpinning repository schema: the‘portfolio’. The portfolio: (1) captures individual objects in the repository on an ongoing basis;(2) brings these objects together in a collection; and crucially (3) overlays narrative andcontext, forming a ‘portfolio’.while the concepts of ‘collection’ and ‘version’ have become common with the adventof data repositories, their existing characterisations do not adequately express therelationships between practice research’s aggregated and updated objectsThe key enhancement over a ‘collection’ as currently understood by the DataCite orDublinCore metadata schema, for example, is that the ‘portfolio’ recognises the researchnarrative and contextualising textual elements, and chronological date attributes: that is, itboth aggregates objects and overlays narrative context.Validation for the wider applicability of the ‘portfolio’ was completed against the schema ofthe British Library’s Shared Research Repository for cultural and heritage organisations.While the British Library’s Shared Research Repository has ‘collections’, they represent apost-hoc collation of outputs, rather than representing an output in its own right; nor did the‘collection’ type have the time elements or narrative of the enhanced portfolio schema,proving the value of the portfolio type. We therefore take portfolios to be the key enablingfeature of infrastructure that supports practice research processes, outputs, and data in away that will improve their discoverability, reusability, and robustness.The project workstream addressing open standards identified potential improvements toexisting standards, rather than creating new ones, prioritising the Research Activity Identifier(RAiD) for portfolios; DataCite DOIs; and the Contributor Roles Taxonomy (CRediT), withpotential for improvements across the landscape.Enabling practice research affordances within the global open standards landscape, is notjust important in and of itself, it is key to enabling the discovery and appreciation of morediverse research practices to global academia, decisionmakers and for teaching andlearning. These projects, while primarily focused on creative practice communities,highlighted the importance of collaborating closely with all those committed to practiceresearch. This collaboration is crucial for understanding and identifying both the technicaland socio-cultural barriers — including skills and training — to enable Findable, Accessible,Interoperable and Re-usable (FAIR) practice research outputs across disciplines. With theinsights gathered from these projects, let us collectively work towards breaking down these4/4barriers and enabling the seamless management and sharing of practice research outputsacross all disciplines. By doing so, we can foster a more inclusive and impactful scholarlyecosystem. The content generated on this blog is for information purposes only. This Article gives theviews and opinions of the authors and does not reflect the views and opinions of the Impactof Social Science blog (the blog), nor of the London School of Economics and PoliticalScience. Please review our comments policy if you have any concerns on posting acomment below.Image Credit: Ahmad Odeh via Unsplash.

A DOI is not enough – can practice research be captured by libraries and archives?

https://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/214374/3/blogs.lse.ac.uk-A%20DOI%20is%20not%20enough%20%20Can%20practice%20research%20be%20captured%20by%20libraries%20and%20archives.pdf

A DOI is not enough – can practice research be captured by libraries and archives?

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