For those with an interest in emerging arts repositories, the Repositories Support Project held a timely meeting earlier this week, Open Access and Repositories in the Arts. Only two actual repository examples were presented, the Kultur repository at University of the Arts London, a KeepIt project partner, and PRIMO (Practice as Research in Music Online), which wants to be a music journal within a repository framework. Both gave interesting if somewhat conventional talks without capturing the distinctive and novel character of the repositories.
The meeting reminded me that the JISC Start-up and Enhancement Projects Training (SUETr) had covered similar ground, in the guise of Multimedia Deposits, in March this year. As well as PRIMO, the meeting included presentations on managing moving and static images in repositories. Slideshare versions of these presentations are embedded in page linked above.
Another noteworthy SUETr event, because it included presentations from KeepIt project partners, covered repository policy. Andrew Gray from UAL, again, and Miggie Pickton from Northampton are among six presentations on a difficult and often-avoided topic but which is an essential precursor to effective digital preservation planning.
For a more detailed report on this event, see Sarah Gentleman’s report for RIN http://www.rin.ac.uk/open-access-arts-repository.
Note, the title for this report is not really substantiated in the piece nor was it, if I recall, at the meeting (perhaps in the final panel session?). Either way, it is of no consequence. IRs are for collecting open access content; dissemination is disciplinary. That’s the only distinction required.
To fill in one gap, on Charles Openheim’s talk on copyright. Charles invariably prefaces such talks by noting he is not a lawyer, but he still brings authority and clarity. I think he could have given this talk at almost any time I have known him, which is some time.
Actually my slides from the SUETr event are not up, simply because I could not clear all the images for online use. In fact all my slides were just images
Thanks for the mention of my blog Steve! Title of my blog was a slide from Rachel Proudfoot’s presentation – sorry, I probably didn’t make it clear enough that I was using it to highlight the idea that researchers need to be included and engaged in the process of setting up repositories, so their perspective (i.e. what they consider important, as well as what an institution considers is needed) is taken into account about how they might find them useful. Some of the slides are now up on the RSP’s site http://www.rsp.ac.uk/events/index.php?page=ArtsForum2009-07-14/index.php.