Research Capacity Building in Education: The Role of Digital Archives

ABSTRACT

Accounts of how research capacity in education can be developed often make reference to electronic networks and online resources. This paper presents a theoretically driven analysis of the role of one such resource, an online archive of educational research studies that includes not only digitised collections of original documents but also videos of contextual interviews with the original researchers, linked and presented using emerging ‘semantic web’ technologies. An exploration with a group of early career researchers in education of how the archive might be used to support their own research activities is reported: this suggests that thinking about such online resources as elements of heterogeneous ‘assemblages’ may be useful in their design and in understanding their role in research training and research networks more generally.

Keywords:

• research capacity
• networking
• digital archives
• assemblages
• evaluation

Acknowledgements

The work reported here was funded under the ESRC project ‘Representing Context in an Archive of Educational Evaluations’ (RES-346-25-3003). I would like to acknowledge the particular contributions of the following: Prof. David Bridges, Ms Louise Corti, Prof. John Elliott, Prof. Mary James and Dr Kathleen Lane, who were my project colleagues. The continuing development of the digital archive described in this article has drawn on the work of Ms Agustina Martinez Garcia, Dr Kate Litherland, Mr Simon Morris and Prof. David Karger as part of the TLRP TEL project ‘Ensemble: Semantic Technologies for the Enhancement of Case Based Learning’ (RES-139-25-0403).