Unheard voices: practice based arts research and the PID landscape

A breakout session at Repository Fringe in Edinburgh in 2018 began the discussion on capturing practice-based arts research in repositories in the UK and discussed the fact that many repository systems don’t adequately reflect what this research looks like. At a similar time the UK focussed Practice Research Advisory Group – a researcher led community – was having discussions about how to ensure this research is discoverable and preserved for the long term. Awareness and experiences captured by these communities led Jisc to hold an event in March 2019 on Capturing Practice Research: improving visibility and searchability. What had been a UK focussed discussion was then taken to an international audience with a panel discussion session at Open Repositories in 2019 in Hamburg. These discussions have identified that the persistent identifier landscape isn’t really an even playing field for this research which doesn’t tend to look like other, more traditional forms of research. This session aimed to bring together interested people from all over the world to talk about PIDs in practice-based arts research. It started with a brief case study on the experience at the University of Westminster, based in London in the UK, who engaged with their practice-based arts research community (and supplier Haplo) to develop their new open source repository software to identify what this research looks like and how the repository could better reflect it. We then highlighted how various Persistent Identifiers don’t quite fit the practice-research landscape – or where they could do, how and where practitioners require more specific guidance that addresses practice research. Without this, the many benefits of the PID graph/landscape are not available to the practice-based research community. The specific examples we covered included: ORCID iDs, DOIs, RAID and the CRediT taxonomy