Engaging Researchers With the World's First Scholarly Arts Repositories: Ten Years After the UK's Kultur Project

ABSTRACT

Open access institutional repositories can be ill-equipped to manage the complexity of research outputs from departments of fine arts, media, drama, music, cultural heritage, and the creative arts in general. The U.K.-based Kultur project was funded to create a flexible multimedia repository model using EPrints software. The project launched the first arts based institutional repositories at the University of the Arts London and University for the Creative Arts. Ten years later, these pioneering repositories are still evolving in response to the needs of arts researchers, and in the context of rapid changes in the scholarly communications landscape. This article discusses the evolution of scholarly repositories in the creative arts, with the aim of reducing the under-representation of arts research in open access repositories.

KEYWORDS:

• Institutional repository
• open access publishing
• scholarly communication
• arts and humanities
• practice-based research

Notes

¹ The Kultivate Project Containers plugin (West, 2012) can also document the relationship between projects and individual research outputs.