Art and Design

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Case Studies

UKRN case study: Museum studies
University of Bristol case study: Creating a special collection at the Bill Douglas Cinema Museum.
University of Leeds School of Design: Addressing post-consumer textile waste in developing economies
University of Leeds School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies: ‘Sold! The Year of the Dealer’ with Mark Westgarth
University of Leeds case study: Addressing post-consumer textile waste in developing economies
University of Leeds: Changing the Story

Examples of open research practices

Open Outputs: The National Gallery of Art (NGA) is a key example of a gallery that is gradually opening its resources for the public to use freely. This is in the format of an online repository named ‘NGA Images’ with the following terms: “NGA Images is a repository of digital images of the collections of the National Gallery of Art. On this website you can search, browse, share, and download images. A standards-based reproduction guide and a help section provide advice for both novices and experts. More than 45,000 open access digital images up to 4000 pixels each are available free of charge for download and use. NGA Images is designed to facilitate learning, enrichment, enjoyment, and exploration.” As well as providing staff and external users with simplified access to research material, the move to open access has resulted in an increased awareness of the gallery’s collections, thus highlighting the advantages of open research.

(https://images.nga.gov/en/page/show_home_page.html)

Open Data: The Concordat on Open Research Data defines research data as “evidence that underpins the answer to the research question” which “can be used to validate findings” (UKRI, 2016). In 2021, the Practice Research Advisory Group (PRAG) recommended that practice-based research datasets could include items such as notebooks, work in progress sound recordings, score drafts, storyboards, and interview transcripts (Bulley & Sahin, 2021).

Leeds Arts University supports its researchers to make their research data as open as possible and as closed as necessary (Leeds Arts University, 2024). An example of one such researcher is Garry Barker, who has deposited sketchbooks relating to his practice-based arts research outputs as open research data on Zenodo under CC BY (Barker, 2024a; Barker, 2024b; Barker, 2024c). These sketchbook datasets are open online archives of Barker’s preliminary work, allowing users free access to underpinning information instrumental to his methodologies and thinking.