Repositories workstream

The repositories workstream is grounded in the research carried out at the University of Westminster in the Centre for Research and Education in Arts and Media (CREAM) and that in the Making and Practice Research Group (formerly the Experimental Practice Research Group) within the School of Architecture and Cities. The Scholarly Communications team led (in partnership with Haplo, now a division of Cayuse) the development of the Haplo open source repository (WestminsterResearch) in close collaboration with these researchers between 2017 and 2021 – one repository for all research. This included the development of the portfolio (or collection) of individual research outputs and an update to templates to better reflect not only the multi-component approach and need for contextual images, but also how a narrative statement articulates the underpinning research.

This led to a number of lessons learned – how the repository and discoverability landscape doesn’t work for this research, how open access looks different to these disciplines, that the funder landscape doesn’t reflect this research and the challenges around copyright and intellectual property rights.

We will use a copy of WestminsterResearch which will be hosted by Cayuse as a closed test system. We will review, identify and iterate changes with a baseline taken from existing feedback on the existing approach to portfolios, and informed by the PRAG-UK Report 2: How can practice research be shared? (Bully & Şahin, 2021) to inform a technical specification.

A survey, feedback on repository development work, semi-structured interviews and potentially one focus group, a follow up survey and a metadata workshop will be used to inform development work on the closed test system.

The technical specification will be tested against the British Library’s Shared Research Repository to identify how the work carried out on the closed test system repository scales to other repository software.