Monday, January 26, 2015

Digital Curation Foundations

Digital Curation Foundations. Stephen Abrams. California Digital Library. January 20, 2015. (PDF).
Digital curation is a complex of actors, policies, practices, and technologies that enables meaningful consumer engagement with authentic content of interest across space and time. The UC Curation Center defines its mission in terms of digital curation, rather than digital preservation because that better expresses the need for coordinated activities of preservation of, and access to, managed assets. It also reflects the idea of ongoing enrichment of managed content rather than just maintaining the content over time. This should ideally start before the assets are created. The approach is more on services than systems, and those services should be delivered at the place they are needed.


The laws of library science deal with use, service to the users, and ongoing change. Every asset should be curated in order to be used. They should be able to be used when and where the user needs them and in accordance with the user's expectations. The digital curation activities must not only be sustainable, but capable of evolving to meet every changing needs as well as risks. This kind of service requires "administrative, financial, and professional support.

Curation decisions should be made with respect to an underlying theory or conceptual domain model based on first principles. The ultimate goal of digital curation is to deliver content. The digital curation field has reached a stage of maturity where it can usefully draw upon a rich body of theoretical research and practical experience. 

  • The curation imperative: providing highly available, responsive, comprehensive, and sustainable services for access to, and use and enhancement of, authentic digital assets over time.
  • The primary unit of curation management is the digital object
  • The true focus of curation is the underlying information meaning of the objects. "In other words, bits are the means, content is the ends."
Curation services include:
  • Creation / acquisition.
  • Appraisal / selection.
  • Preservation planning.
  • Preservation intervention.
  • Selection of appropriate curation service providers
  • Appropriate micro services

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