Departments of fine arts, media, drama, music and cultural heritage are vibrant, research-active, valued contributors to the scholarly community and the research culture of their institutions. Yet Open Access institutional repositories can be ill-equipped to manage the complexity of their research outputs. Hence, the UK-based Kultur project (Jisc, 2007-09) was funded to create a flexible multimedia repository model using the EPrints software.

The Kultur plugin was developed in response to in-depth consultation with arts researchers and provided a metadata profile adapted to practice-based outputs as well as image previews and slideshows to suitably showcase this visual work. The project also launched the first arts based institutional repositories at the University of the Arts London – UAL Research Online - and UCA Research Online at the University for the Creative Arts.

This paper will revisit the first two 'Kulturised' repositories seven years after the completion of the project, investigating how they have matured and are still evolving in response to real world use, looking especially at a number of in-house customisations made in consultation with arts researchers and setting this work in the wider context of the post-Kultur landscape.

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