IAC Art Files
Flagship project of the Swedish National Data Service at LU 2025–26.
The purpose of IAC Art Files is to set up a platform and a portal that enables management and display of individual, thematic and interdisciplinary knowledge production in the arts, as well as sharing functions for artistic research data – to reinforce contact and exchange both between artistic researchers and between scientific and artistic researchers.
IAC Art Files is an initiative of IAC and the Faculty of Fine and Performing Arts on the management of artistic research data and artistic outputs in relation to the FAIR principles and requirements for open research (while taking into account legal and ethical aspects).
Artistic research processes are often open and public by nature, but access to research data is not systematically organised in line with FAIR principles. The IAC Art Files project will therefore work on the categorisation and description of these often innovative and quantitative file types according to the motto ‘as open as possible, as closed as necessary’.
As the flagship of the Swedish National Data Service (SND) at LU 2025–26, a system and portal will be built to form the basis of a new, domain-specific repository to be built, tested and integrated at the Faculty, with the possibility of national use and further development after the end of the project.
The aim of the project is to create solutions for a domain-oriented, stable and sustainable system for categorising, describing, sharing and displaying artistic research data that is compatible with other systems within the university and SND's portal researchdata.se.
The project aims to provide technical solutions, set up administrative procedures, investigate ethical and legal aspects, explore the conceptual and practical framework of the concept of artistic research data, and communicate opportunities to users and evaluate the initial effort.
IAC and IAC Art Files aim to become a national hub for artistic research data that can be used by researchers and artists at LU, other universities and the cultural sector in interaction, and enable research collaborations across disciplinary boundaries.
Why now?
With the transition to a more open research community, where not only completed research results are shared and evaluated, the need for secure storage and backup solutions has increased. This has led to higher national and international requirementsfor the management of research data throughout the whole research process and data lifecycle.
The Swedish Research Council has set a goal of completing the transition to open access to research data by 2026 at the latest. To achieve this, digital infrastructures adapted to the specifics of artistic research are required.
FAIR is an acronym that stands for Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable. The FAIR principles imply that research data should be findable, there should be information on how to access it, it should be interoperable with other data, and it should be reusable.
When you share research data via a so-called repository, you enable others to
review the results of the research and reuse the data in further studies. This requires that the data is organised and presented in a self-explanatory way.
The fundamental principle for Open Science is that results, publications, and associated data from publicly funded research should be made openly accessible from 2026, unless there are legal or ethical reasons preventing this. Ideally, open access means that data are available for direct download; in practice, it is about making access to research data as open as possible, as restricted as necessary.
Read more about "as open as possible, as restricted as necessary" on researchdata.se
In recent years, the need for a secure, user-friendly storage, sharing and display siteadapted to the field has been articulated among IAC users, at the Faculty of Fine and Performing Arts and within the artistic field at national level. Documentation from users and researchers at the Faculty expresses the urgency of establishing a sustainable solution that meets researchers' and artists' requirements for handling documentation and presentation formats that do not compromise reproduction or permanence and also take into account legal and ethical aspects. There is currently no national infrastructure for artistic research data, which is often requested by researchers.
Creative Data Lab
IAC Art Files is part of the Advanced Study Group (ASG) "Creative Data Lab" at the Pufendorf IAS that aims to address the challenges and opportunities in artistic research data management (ARDM). By integrating knowledge from various fields such as digital technology, data management, and artistic research, the researchers aim to develop new methods that support creativity and cross-disciplinary collaboration. The ASG includes several members from the Faculty and is coordinated by Hedvig Jalhed and Madeleine Bergquist.
IAC Art Files
- Database and platform for displaying works with high display/playback quality and interactive possibilities
- FAIR principles and requirements for open research while taking into account legal and ethical aspects
- Flagship project at the Swedish National Data Service (SND)
- Start of the project in 2025
Swedish National Data Service (SND)
SND is a consortium of the largest Swedish universities that work together in time limited flagship projects to ‘develop tools and methods to facilitate researchers in sharing and reusing data’.
Introduction to SND's new flagship projects
Webinar via Zoom: 28 April, at 13:00–14:00 (in Swedish)