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.     

Training in interactive sports

The general purpose of this systematic review was to study the effectiveness of off-court perceptual–cognitive training interventions in nonnovice, interactive sport athletes. We looked at task-specific practice effects and, more importantly, the transfer of effects. Databases used for the literature search were PubMed, Web of Science, and PsycINFO. In all, 16 studies were found to be eligible for this review. These studies were independently evaluated by four reviewers for methodological quality and their evidence for specific practice effects and transfer effects. The effectiveness was analyzed with respect to the level of transfer, i.?e., from training-task-specific effects to near-transfer (e.?g., a similar perceptual task), further-transfer (e.?g., a sensorimotor sports skill), and far-transfer (e.?g., competition performance) intervention effects. Analyses of the 16 included studies suggest that around 60% of the training-specific measures tested after off-court practicing perceptual–cognitive training in sports athletes signal performance enhancement. However, transfer, be it near, further or far, is mostly not studied empirically; if studied, there is currently only limited and weak evidence for intermediate and far transfer. To reason that perceptual–cognitive off-court training interventions are ineffective might be premature at this point of time as methodological quality can still be improved and only a very limited number of studies actually included transfer variables. In those few studies integrating transfer variables, results are mixed and inconsistent. Future work should focus on critical factors to assure transfer of perceptual–cognitive training interventions.