Adventures in digital curation

Meg MeimanUniversity of Delaware

meiman@udel.edu

Digital Conversion Interest Group ALCTS-PARS/ALA

June 23, 2012

Adventures in Digital Curationor, advice for the novice solo curator

What is (digital) curation?

OED definition: [curation is] “the supervision by a curator of a collection of preserved or exhibited items.”

Novice definition: maintaining preservation of digital content into perpetuity (or until I die or quit my job)

LOC’s definition: “the selection, maintenance, collection and archiving of digital assets, in addition to their preservation.”

From curation to stewardship

“ ‘Digital stewardship’…pull[s] in the lifecycle approach of curation along with research in digital libraries and electronic records archiving, broadening the emphasis from the e-science community on scientific data to address all digital materials, while continuing to emphasize digital preservation as a core component of action.”

From Butch Lazorchak’s “Digital Preservation, Digital Curation, Digital Stewardship: What’s in (Some) Names?” The Signal: Digital Preservation. Blog post. August 23, 2011.

Questions for consideration

How do we prioritize what to keep for the historical record? (a.k.a., the “triage” approach)

In what formats should this content be maintained?

How can we build digital curation into our current preservation practices and daily workflow?

Who else can help with all of this?

“Triage” -- assessing the scope of what you curate

Data → senior theses by undergraduate researchers

Metadata → information about undergraduate researchers (names, project titles,

faculty mentors)

Still more data → students’ proposals for summer and capstone research projects

Senior theses (data) PDF/A

requires embedded references (no hyperlinks) no video or audio files allowed

Information about students (metadata)MS Access

→XML files for immediate backup→MySQL for long-term storage and

access

Curating born-digital content

Sheer curation (keep it lightweight)

“If we focus…on defining strategies for quietly integrating curation support into the scientific work flow, we may hope to make a far greater proportion of the digital assets being created today available into the future. We’ve tentatively dubbed this approach “sheer curation” – “sheer” as in lightweight and virtually transparent….good data and digital asset management at local levels is also good practice in preparing for publication and/or preservation of data and other digital assets.”

From Alistair Miles’ “Zoological Case Studies in Digital Curation.”

“Front-end” curation

Implement and refine guidelines for content creators

→Theses submitted in PDF format→All URLs in senior theses are typed out, with full references included→Multimedia theses are submitted in alternate formats (CD/DVD)

“Back-end” curation

Develop practices to incorporate curation into existing workflow and timeline

late May → students upload theses to websiteearly June → download PDFs and save as

PDF/Alate June → save to network and external

hard driveearly July → save MS Access data as XML fileslate July → migrate MS Access data to MySQL

Iterative cycle of digital curation

Assess (or re-assess) available

resources

Determine/refine scope of curated

content

(Re-)prioritize what to curate

Develop/refine guidelines for

content creators

Develop/refine “good enough”

curation practices

Curating in a one-person operation

What other avenues are available to assist with digital curation?

Institutional repositoriesCollege and university archivesCreators of digital content

Some (hopefully) useful take-aways

Assess or re-assess available resources (IT support, technology, staff, and funding)

Determine / refine the scope of curated contentPrioritize what you absolutely, positively have

to curate (get input from stakeholders, if appropriate)

Develop /refine guidelines for content creators (“front-end” curation)

Develop / refine “good enough” curation practices to incorporate into workflow (“back-end” curation)

Some sources that informed this talk

Lazorchak, Butch. “Digital Preservation, Digital Curation, Digital Stewardship: What’s in (Some) Names?” The Signal: Digital Preservation. Blog post. August 23, 2011. (Full URL in handout.)

Miles, Alistair. “Zoological Case Studies in Digital Curation – DCC SCARP /ImageStore.” June 6, 2007.

http://alimanfoo.wordpress.com/2007/06/

The Signal: Digital Preservation. Library of Congress. http://blogs.loc.gov/digitalpreservation/

Ramalho, José, Miguel Ferreira, Luís Faria, and Rui Castro. “Relational Database Preservation through XML modeling.” Extreme

Markup Languages 2007, Montréal, Quebec, August 7 – 10, 2007. (Full URL in handout.)

I’d like to thank the Academy…

Martha Horan

Kevin O’Sullivan

Dr. Lynnette Overby, my supervisor

Digital Conversion Interest Group listserv

members

You – thank you for your time and attention

Questions for consideration

How do we prioritize the selection of born-digital content for digital curation?

In what formats should this content be maintained?

How can we build digital curation into our current preservation practices and daily workflow?

Who else can help with all of this?