The Information Professional

Robin Good: Data (or Digital) Curation, is an academic/scientific discipline dedicated to preserve, organize and collect digital documents and other electronic artifacts for archival, re-use and repurposing objectives.

Check: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_curation and

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_curation

The importance of Data Curation can be easily underestimated as it may appear, to the casual viewer, as an arid, tedious document archival job.

In reality, Digital Curation efforts are of great value to the preservation of important cultural documents and data for future researchers who will want to access, in some organized way, the data-information-artifacts of our time. In addition, the data curation practices and guidelines developed by academic and research institutions can also be of value and inspiration to other types of curation work, that may adopt, emulate or innovate upon them.

If you are interested in learning more about Data/Digital Curation and in identifying the key organizations in this space, here is a good shortlist for you, thanks to the kind work of Kevin "the Librarian" Read:

Useful. 7/10

Source: http://kevinthelibrarian.wordpress.com/2012/07/20/an-introduction-to-the-data-curation-lifecycle-model-where-do-librarians-fit-in/