Telling a story with metadata or Always drink upstream from the herd: What if your metadata isn’t properly represented in the stream?

Abstract

Practice research encompasses diverse disciplines and outputs beyond traditional text-based scholarly work. However, existing infrastructure often overlooks the nuances of practice research, hindering its discoverability and reuse. This article summarizes findings from the Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded Practice Research Voices project, which aimed to scope recommendations for enabling practice research across repositories, metadata standards, and community engagement. We present key challenges facing practice research infrastructure, including the complexity of representing iterative, multi-component outputs. Drawing on repository development at the University of Westminster, we propose the ‘portfolio’ concept to aggregate objects and overlay narrative context. We also describe opportunities to evolve standards such as DataCite, RAiD, and CRediT to better accommodate practice research needs, and the value of a cross-domain community of practice. Our recommendations emphasize co-design with researchers and recognizing diverse forms of knowledge creation. Improving discovery and interoperability for practice research will require culture change across the scholarly infrastructure landscape. This project demonstrates that lessons learned from practice disciplines can benefit research more broadly through inclusive and flexible systems.