What is Enact delivering now and when will it be available?
Enact is currently establishing Enact: Core – a three-year programme (Oct 2025 – Sep 2028) to build a practice research repository and the community, skills and standards around it. This is the next step following on from the PR Voices and SPARKLE projects. We are building Enact: Core to be scalable and to allow for future development, expansion and investment.
Is Enact available to use?
Enact is not yet open to general deposit. Enact is being developed with a wide community of practice researchers based at a range of institutions through a programme of Pathfinder projects. You can register an interest in contributing to the next stage of the Pathfinder project by completing this form.
How does Enact relate to the Research Excellence Framework?
Enact will become a core part of the Research Environment for practice research, capturing diverse outputs, processes, documentation, and data, as well as the narratives and context that connect them and their contributors, enabling citation and sharing. Enact is not designed as a REF2029 submission or reporting system, but its functionality can make REF submission easier since it allows practice researchers to organise their work (such as artefacts, documentation of final and draft work), research narratives and supporting materials to facilitate both internal reviewing and REF submission.
What type of repository is the Enact Repository?
Enact is a specialist discipline repository whose development and purpose reflects the nuances of practice research and its contributors in a way no other repository does. It is not an institutional repository that has been created for publications and/or has been adapted from a system built for these text-based outputs.
Enact is relationship-focused. It allows researchers to explain how elements (artworks, documentation, drafts/sketches, explanations/narratives, demonstrations, performances, etc) are connected within a single output or across a body of practice, as well as how it relates externally to work by other artists and scholars. Similarly, it encourages broad accreditation of contributor roles, rather than simply listing ‘authors’.
Enact treats a body of work as a practice research process in its own right, it makes the relationships between items visible and describable, and it presents audio, moving image and other non-text material as the work rather than as attachments.
The Enact community is made up of discipline and domain experts. Enact will provide a place for them to come together – practice researchers and the repository managers, librarians, curators and research managers who support them – to discover, discuss and contribute to the sharing of practice research.
Who are the Enact team?
Enact is led by an invested team of sector experts from University of the Arts London, the University of Leeds, Queen Mary University of London and the University of Westminster. The project is currently based at the University of Westminster, is funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and builds on the earlier PR Voices and SPARKLE projects. Enact is working with technology partner, CoSector, University of London.
How do I get in touch?
Sign up to the Enact mailing list for updates, or email the team directly at Enact@westminster.ac.uk
This a living document, which will grow, so please email any further questions and feedback to Enact@westminster.ac.uk