Digital Curation

To explain the utility of semantic search and linked data, Jeff Penka, director of channel and product development for information management solutions provider Zepheira, uses a simple exercise. Type “Chevy Chase” into Google’s search box, and in addition to a list of links, a panel appears on the right of the screen, displaying photos of the actor, a short bio, date of birth, height, full name, spouses and children, and a short list of movies and TV shows in which he has starred.

Libraries, archives, museums, and other cultural heritage organizations collect, create, and steward a rapidly increasing volume of digital content. Both research conclusions and professionals’ real-life experiences expose the inherent fragility of this content. The cultural heritage and information science communities have developed guidelines, best practices, policies, procedures, and processes that can enable an organization to achieve high levels of digital preservation.

A couple of weeks ago I joined UCL’s free – and excellent – 8 week online Digital Curation course. It has several hundred participants from all over the world – many of them professionals and students in the Archiving and Curation field. The course covers what digital curation is, how it is performed, and its major activities and communities worldwide, as well as leading participants through some practical digital curation work on their own files. This latter activity is a perfect fit with the trial I am currently performing of an approach to creating and planning a Preservation Plan.

Volume 25 Issue 1, Digital Diplomatics
urpose
This paper aims to construct a systematic way of thinking about correspondence as a documentary form and discusses the role its persistent representation features play in management, preservation and access of email correspondence.

Volume 25 Issue 1, Digital Diplomatics
Purpose
This paper explores a new model of ‘record’ that maps traditional attributes of a record onto a technical decomposition of digital records. It compares the core characteristics necessary to call a digital object a ‘record’ in terms of diplomatics, or ‘evidence’ in terms of digital forensics. It then isolates three layers of abstraction: the conceptual, the logical, and the physical. By identifying the essential elements of a record at each layer of abstraction, a diplomatics of digital records can be proposed.

Research conducted at Purdue University and the University of Illinois resorted in the instrument, the Data Curation Profiles Toolkit. This tool is used to interview researchers and data producers about the data they create in research projects, what they are doing with it, and what they would like to do with it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f8oNJ6JIPEo&list=PLJfQmTStwzSO48DJalzD3Q...
Nancy McGovern at CurateGear 2015. Get slides for this and other CurateGear talks at http://ils.unc.edu/digccurr/curategear2015-talks/mcgovern.pdf

Tate has announced that intimate love letters from Paul Nash to his wife, touching family photographs of Jacob Epstein, unpublished images revealing Eduardo Paolozzi’s playful nature, 45 volumes of Barbara Hepworth’s sculpture records and correspondence from William Nicholson to his son Ben are among the first batch of items to be made available on Tate’s website for a world-wide audience as part of the Archives and Access project.

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. To ensure that it is using its curation resources in the most productive manner, the University of California Curation Center (UC3) has modeled the curation domain to provide a consistent, comprehensive, yet parsimonious conceptual foundation for the planning, implementation, and evaluation of its manifold activities.

In 1994, linguist Geoff Nunberg stated, in an article in the journal “Representations,” “reading what people have had to say about the future of knowledge in an electronic world, you sometimes have the picture of somebody holding all the books in the library by their spines and shaking them until the sentences fall out loose in space…” What would these fragments look like if you took every page of every book from 2.5 million volumes dating back over 500 years? Could every illustration, drawing, chart, map, photograph and image be extracted, indexed and displayed?