The Information Specialist's Scoop

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:

 

University of Arizona – Digital Information Management
University of Illinois – Data Curation Education Program
University of North Carolina – DigCCurr University of Virginia – Scientific Data Consulting

Digital Curation Centre Digital Curation Exchange International Journal of Digital Curation Purdue-UIUC Data Curation Profiles Project

 

 

Useful. 7/10

 

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

 

 

 

Via Robin Good

Ant Miller (BBC Research and Development Blog):

"In this second part of the Archive Research film we take a look at the key challenges addressed by the 'preservation' work of R&D and the BBC Information & Archives teams.  With interviews from Dr Richard Wright, Adrian Williams of I&A and others, Alex Mansfield gets to the bottom of the latest technologies being used to ensure that the critical challenge of obsolescence is handled, and handled effectively and efficiency.

With huge files, and critical quality checks essential to preserving the legacy of the archive, the best efforts of engineers and archivists are being applied to saving this content for the future."

Via Karen du Toit