Digital curation

Digital curation is the selection,preservation, maintenance, collection and archiving of digital assets. Digital curation establishes, maintains and adds value to repositories of digital data for present and future use. This is often accomplished by archivists, librarians, scientists, historians, and scholars. Enterprises are starting to use digital curation to improve the quality of information and data within their operational and strategic processes. Successful digital curation will mitigate digital obsolescence, keeping the information accessible to users indefinitely.

The term curation in the past commonly referred to museum and library professionals. It has since been applied to interaction with social media including compiling digital images, web links and movie files.

For some topics, knowledge is embodied in forms that have not been conducive to print, such as how choreography of dance or of the motion of skilled workers or artisans is difficult to encode. New digital approaches such as 3D holograms and other computer-programmed expressions are developing.

For mathematics, it seems possible for a new common language to be developed that would express mathematical ideas in ways that can be digitally stored, linked, and made accessible. The Global Digital Mathematics Library is a project to define and develop such a language.

The process of converting printed resources into digital collections has been epitomized to some degree by librarians and related specialists. For example, The Digital Curation Centre is claimed to be a "world leading centre of expertise in digital information curation" that assists higher education research institutions in such conversions. The DCC, based in the UK, began operations in early 2004 and suggests the following as a general outline of their approach to digital curation:

Sheer curation is an approach to digital curation where curation activities are quietly integrated into the normal work flow of those creating and managing data and other digital assets. The word sheer is used to emphasize the lightweight and virtually transparent nature of these curation activities. The term sheer curation was coined by Alistair Miles in the ImageStore project, and the UK Digital Curation Centre's SCARP project. The approach depends on curators having close contact or 'immersion' in data creators' working practices. An example is the case study of a neuroimaging research group by Whyte et al., which explored ways of building its digital curation capacity around the apprenticeship style of learning of neuroimaging researchers, through which they share access to datasets and re-use experimental procedures.

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