Curation planning
Research data is the materials that underpin a research project or output. Rather than using the term "research data" some practice researchers find it more useful to use the term "documentation of process" (for example, notebooks, sketchbooks) when discussing the material that underpin their output (for example, an exhibition, film, score or performance).
Practice research often produces complex multimedia research documentation and datasets that can be in both digital and physical formats, including:
- preparatory materials such as notebooks, reflective journals and sketchbooks
- anonymised audience surveys
- prototype software
- work in progress sound recordings
- score drafts
- storyboards
- interview transcripts
- found objects
- records of time-based one-off events, such as exhibitions, musical improvisations, installations, or performances
Good curation practices ensure that the documentation of your creative process and artistic practice can be preserved, helping you to build your profile as a practitioner-researcher by maximising the potential to share your work, collaborate with other researchers and manage future access to your research materials.
Curation planning can make it easier to manage your research materials during a project and save you time and effort when you come to reappraise past work, enabling future projects based on your research to be built on solid foundations. It can also be useful when preparing the submission of practice research outputs to research assessment exercises such as the Research Excellence Framework (REF).
The importance of curation planning will vary depending on the nature of a research project, but we encourage all practice researchers at Goldsmiths to think about curation planning at the start of a project and to understand best practice for organising their research documentation and datasets.
If you are new to research data management and curation planning, the University for the Creative Arts has created an introductory toolkit on visual arts research data.
Research lifecycle
It can be helpful to think of curation planning in terms of a research data lifecycle and the data-related activities that take place at stages during this lifecycle. The Royal College of Art have developed a research data lifecycle model that aims to support good curation planning within the arts, building on existing models to reflect the disciplinary needs and processes inherent within art, design and practice research.
Cridford, Thomas, 2020, Royal College of Art research data lifecycle model, Royal College of Art, London. Available under License Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial Share Alike.https://researchonline.rca.ac.uk/4432/
Further information on the different activities that take place in the six stages of the lifecycle is listed below.
Research lifecycle stages
Writing a curation or digitisation plan (also referred to as a ‘data management plan’) at the beginning of a new piece of work or project can help you think about how you will visualise and document your creative process, and how you will create, curate, store, digitise, preserve and share this research content.
A curation or digitisation plan is a formal document that describes how you will manage your research materials and the documentation of your creative practice during and beyond the lifetime of your research project.
You do not need to approach curation and data management planning too rigidly as it is understood that your plans will change and need updating over time as your project evolves. But writing a plan before you begin to create your research materials will help you make choices early on in your project about how your research materials will be digitised and stored, and how they can be used, shared and preserved.
A good curation plan will save you time and effort later by reducing the risk of losing data or disclosing confidential data, making it easier to appraise and select data that should be preserved, or which can be disposed to save space.
Because of the diversity of practice research, there is no single correct answer to what a curation plan should cover. However, a good plan should typically address how you intend to create, describe, curate, secure, preserve, and share your research data or research materials. You should justify the decisions you make and be prepared to implement your plan.
Guidance on writing a data management plan is available on Goldmine.
A good way to get started with writing a plan is to begin with a suitable template. We recommend using DMPOnline an online tool which provides templates and example plans. There are currently very few examples plans for practice research projects on DMPOnline but some have started to be archived on the site, for example, You Lyu Intercultural Physical Theatre and Zhi Xu Interdisciplinary Insights: Dance, Motion Capture and Cultural Identity.
The Royal College of Art hosts a range of annotated plans to reflect the disciplinary needs and processes inherent within art and design.
The University for the Creative Arts have a toolkit on data management planning tailored for visual arts researchers.
You will need to consider how you will you capture and organise the materials you create throughout your project to best capture your process and practice.
Implementing a logical and consistent system to organise your digital materials and files allows you and your project collaborators to locate and use them effectively. There are three main elements to data organisation:
- a filing system. The UK Data Service has guidance on creating a logical, hierarchical folder structure to store your files.
- file naming rules. The UK Data Service has guidance on the intelligent use of file naming to enable you and others to easily identify the contents of a file.
- a version control policy. The UK Data Service has guidance on how to version control files.
The file formats you use to create materials may affect what you can do with them and how effectively they can be preserved and shared. Goldsmiths has guidance on recommended file formats. You may also find it helpful to consult the UK Data Service guidance on recommended formats and the Digital Preservation Coalition guidance on file formats and standards.
Effective documentation is crucial in making research materials findable and reusable in the future. The process of documentation is likely to result in the creation of metadata. The UK Data Service has guidance on how to document data effectively.
Digital materials
As a general principle research data should always be stored on Goldsmiths supported storage: SharePoint (MS Teams) or OneDrive. We do not recommend using external storage devices, such as hard drives, memory sticks, personal laptops or commercial cloud storage services (Google Drive, Dropbox etc.) as they are not supported by IT&IS. IT&IS information on file storage for Goldsmiths research data is available on Goldmine.
IT&IS can also provide guidance on encrypting and backing up your data so that you can restore it quickly in case of data loss.
Non-digital physical materials
You should think about how you will protect non-digital physical materials or artefacts that cannot be digitised. These unique materials are at particular risk of loss, so you should make sure that they are protected some other way. For example, depositing the material in an archive or special collections, or storing it securely in a safe.
Many practice researchers keep hand-written notebooks, reflective journals and other materials which are not created or stored on a computer. We recommend that you think about how you will create, store, digitise, and preserve your physical and non-digital research materials at the beginning of a new project.
You should think about how you will make digital copies of non-digital materials, for example, by taking digital photographs, scanning documents, or transcribing audio and video files. You should also think about how you will keep track of which materials you have digitised, and which still need to be backed-up digitally.
You can find detailed guidance on managing and digitising non-digital data on the OpenAIRE open research platform and the UK Data Service.
Before you can go about sharing your research materials and data, you will need to identify what needs to be retained and preserved. You are unlikely to need to preserve all the materials you create in the course of your research project.
When appraising your research materials and data, it is important to consider the potential re-use value of the material, as well as any legal or ethical issues. You will need to select material of value and dispose of the remainder.
The Digital Curation Centre have guidance on how to appraise and select research materials and data for curation.
Material that you do not consider having long-term value will need to be destroyed in a secure manner. The UK Data Service have guidance on disposal.
Not all research data can be made publicly available. Appropriate safeguards need to be in place before data that contain sensitive or confidential information can be shared. If your data is too sensitive to share publicly, you could preserve and make available a summarised or anonymised version. The UK Data Service have guidance on anonymising data. You can deposit datasets under an embargo in GRO. This will ensure that you can deposit the data at convenient point in your research process and have it automatically made public at a future date. Further guidance on ethics and legal compliance is available on Goldmine and the UK Data Service.
The University for the Creative Arts have a toolkit on managing research materials tailored for visual arts researchers that includes strategies for appraising and selecting data.
Once you have prepared your datasets and research materials for preservation, they can be deposited in our institutional repository Goldsmiths Research Online (GRO).
GRO provides long-term hosting and preservation for research data. The repository aligns with best practice and standards, including the use of Dublin Core metadata standards, ensuring information is preserved, accessible and usable for future research. GRO uses Arkivum, to provide secure digital preservation to ISO Standard 27001:2017.
Data and research materials can be added to GRO as a standalone dataset record (for example, Angela Phillips and Carla Cruz’s Tagore, Pedagogy and Contemporary Visual Cultures dataset) or the material can be added as accompanying files in a GRO research output record.
Text, image, audio video and database files can all be uploaded to GRO. A list of recommended file formats is available here.
A Digital Object Identifier (DOI) will be created for all datasets uploaded to GRO to improve discoverability, allowing other researchers to easily and accurately cite the work.
Creative Commons licensing is recommended when publishing research data as it allows you to share your data while stating clearly what others can do with the it. Further information about Creative Commons licensing is available in the “Licensing and Copyright” section of this LibGuide.
If you use websites or platforms such as Vimeo or YouTube to share your creative outputs and disseminate your research, you should think about how you will preserve this material more securely long-term, by depositing copies of these materials in GRO.
Funder policies on research data
Funders expect researchers to manage research materials responsibly and most research funders require applicants for funding to either complete a data management plan or answer a set of questions about the proposed data management plans as part of the funding application process.
The format and content of data management plans differ between funders, as do the expectations around publishing, sharing, and preserving your research materials at the end of your project.
If you are applying to a research funder, you should familiarise yourself with their data management and sharing expectations and make sure you use the correct data management plan template.
Further guidance on funder requirements for research data management is available on Goldmine.
Guidance on project design for arts practice research, including an overview of funders' understanding of practice research is available on Goldmine.
The Royal College of Art hosts a range of annotated funder templates to reflect the disciplinary needs and processes inherent within art and design.