Capturing Creativity 2025 - Presentation 2: 9th October 2025 - Practice Research Diaries, a Project Report (Scott McLaughlin, Claire Knowles, Rachel Proudfoot)

<p dir="ltr">Presentation 2 from the 'Capturing Creativity 2025' series of seminars, on Thursday 9th October, 2025.</p><p dir="ltr">The session was chaired by Dr. Avsar Gurpinar. Assoc. Prof. Avşar Gürpınar is a scholar, designer, and co-founder of the Ambiguous Standards Institute. He holds degrees in Electrical Engineering and Industrial Product Design. In 2021, the Arts Council England endorsed him as an exceptional talent in arts and culture. Avşar works as a senior lecturer in contemporary art and speculative design at the School of Design and Creative Arts, Loughborough University. His research focuses on critical design, cultural studies, and art and design history. His works include "When Pigs Fly," a public artwork created in collaboration with Cansu Curgen, and "Ambiguous Standards Institute's" solo exhibition, held at the Art Institute of Chicago in 2021. The Art Institute of Chicago, MSU Broad, and Loughborough University have acquired several pieces of ASI's work for their permanent collections.</p><p dir="ltr">Speakers: Scott McLaughlin, Claire Knowles and Rachel Proudfoot.</p><p dir="ltr">Scott McLaughlin, Associate Professor in Music and Director of Centre for Practice Research in the Arts. Scott McLaughlin is a composer and free-improviser (cello, live electronics) based in Huddersfield, UK. Born in Ireland (Co. Clare) in 1975, he wanted to be a scientist but instead spent his early 20s playing guitar in art-indie bands between Galway and Belfast. Slowly he discovered more experimental non-pop musics, leading to a foundation course and subsequent BMus degree in music at the University of Ulster at Jordanstown, completed in 2001. Somewhere between that and completing his PhD at the University of Huddersfield in 2009, he reconnected with science via music, with the help of supervisors Pierre Alexandre Tremblay, Bryn Harrison, James Saunders, and Christopher Fox. Currently he teaches composition and music-technology at University of Leeds and still enjoys reverb-drenched feedback.</p><p dir="ltr">Claire Knowles, Associate Library Director: Research and Digital Futures. Claire joined the University of Leeds as a member of the Library Executive Team in September 2018. She provides strategic leadership for the library’s research services, working in partnership with colleagues in faculties and professional services to embed change with research practice within these areas: open research; repository services; research data management; bibliometrics; open access funder compliance. Working in partnership with the academic chairs of the Responsible Research Metrics and Open Research groups, Claire is leading the digital libraries infrastructure project for cultural collections, a major infrastructure investment project that includes cloud migration, digitisation, ingestion and digital preservation solutions for the University.</p><p dir="ltr">Rachel Proudfoot, Library Research Data Team. Rachel has extensive experience in Library and information services across the Higher Education sector, including research support system assessment and deployment, project management and face to face and online training development.</p><p dir="ltr">Synopsis: The University of Leeds ran a six-month project in 2025 to generate a detailed snapshot of how practice researchers currently interact with library data systems, how they make their work FAIR (findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable). The project outputs are a set of recommendations aimed at addressing longstanding issues around how (artistic) practice research outputs are created and linked to Library systems, both for general archiving and availability and for REF submission. This project extends the work done on the AHRC-funded SPARKLE project in 2022 ('Sustaining Practice Assets for Research, Knowledge, Learning and Engagement'). The project asked five researchers (from different arts disciplines and experience levels) to diarise how and when they disseminate their practice (and towards what audiences) and where it is stored and held regular meetings with researcher and library/REF colleagues to develop best practices for entering the work into library data systems. Even with only five participants there was a broad range of issues and questions regarding best-fit for the library data systems, demonstrating repeatedly the difficulty in seeking standardised approaches.</p><p dir="ltr">This presentation will provide an overview of the recommendations and look at some case studies from the project that highlight different issues raised by the participant’s work. The primary recommendations are: (1) to create more training and resources for practice researchers and library staff on thinking through the ways that large amounts of digital objects should be ‘packaged up’ for a repository, especially when projects and research insights may be continuous/ongoing; and bearing in mind the sometimes conflicting needs of dissemination and REF returns; (2) developing best practices for navigating the complex ecosystems across the CRIS and the often multiple institutional repositories.</p><p dir="ltr">This item contains: MP4 recording of the presentation with transcript and Powerpoint slides.</p>