Facilitated by Suzan Alteri and Dan Reboussin
Digital curation is the “active management of digital resources over the life-cycle of scholarly and scientific interest.” We will discuss several activities that can be undertaken once a collection is online in order to improve scholarly access. State of the art access depends on the acknowledgement of both social and technical aspects of the way information is indexed by online search engines. Effective curation allows researchers to discover relevant collections they weren’t already aware of prior to conducting an online search. Examples of curation activities to be discussed and demonstrated include: creating detailed metadata, building a rich scholarly context on collection landing pages, creating useful subcollection divisions, and contributing to appropriate sites in ways that support online discoverability.
In the Mellon-funded “Future of Scholarly Communication” project that I worked on prior to coming to UF, one of our big findings is that folks in the disciplines perceived curation as “services to scholarship” or “tool building” rather than actual scholarship. It is clear to me that these perceptions ignore the significant scholarly interpretations embedded in curation activities which are in many ways the production of a knowledge structure not unlike that involved in creating book-length prose. Anyway, as with Lindsey Harding’s session, we need to interrogate this meaning-making and its activities. Thanks, Susan!
Thanks, Sophia! Another problem I have found is that, at least in the library literature, they refer to digital preservation instead of digital curation. The response is more – if you digitize it people will find it so once digitization is complete you don’t have to do anything else. This is a grave error and a disservice to those in the digital humanities. We need significant scholarly interpretations to provide users with a context.
I like this a lot (especially because it overlaps with my interests in partnering with social/scientists who do “data curation,” another side of the same coin.) I have a discussion question: Are we agreed that “effective curation” can only be done by those with MLIS degrees, or can we understand curation as a socially enacted practice that is evolving to include users? I know this is the elephant in the room often; is the role/value of the librarian challenged by the “crowd,” which can be so effective and random all at the same time? Hope we can discuss this from many angles.
Micah,
I’m looking forward to the conversation! I absolutely believe that the social aspects of digital curation are essential for the best outcomes and will focus on these aspects in our session. Social engagement improves access by helping to make search engine results display more prominently, especially for researchers who might not already be familiar with the collection.
Micah,
I’m looking forward to the conversation! I absolutely believe that the social aspects of digital curation are essential for the best outcomes and will focus on these aspects in our session. Social engagement improves access by helping to make search engine results display more prominently, especially for researchers who might not already be familiar with the collection.
Hi Micah!
I think that is an excellent question and certainly something we will want to discuss further. In addition to crowdsourcing I’m planning on offering some different definitions of digital curation – professional and personal – and also how to provide context to digital collections to further scholarship in the digital humanities. I am greatly looking forward to a lively discussion!