Digital curation is the selection,
preservationPreservation may mean:* Cultural Heritage Preservation, which includes:**Preservation , maintenance of artifacts and the intellectual record**Art conservation, the retention of cultural heritage for the future....
, maintenance, and collection and archiving of
digitalA digital system is a data technology that uses discrete values. By contrast, non-digital systems use a continuous range of values to represent information...
assets.
Digital curation is the process of establishing and developing long term repositories of digital assets for current and future reference by researchers, scientists, and historians, and scholars generally.
Digital curation entails:
- Collecting verifiable digital assets
- Providing digital asset search and retrieval
- Certification of the trustworthiness and integrity of the collection content
- Semantic and ontological continuity and comparability of the collection content
Significant and major challenges faced by digital curation are:
- Storage format evolution and obsolescence
- Rate of creation of new data and data sets
- Broad access and searching flexibility and variety
- Comparability of semantic and ontological
Ontology is the philosophical study of the nature of being, existence or reality in general, as well as of the basic categories of being and their relations...
definitions of data sets
The challenges faced by digital curation are resulting in:
- specialised research institutions
- academic courses
- dedicated symposia
- peer reviewed technical and industry journals
to address the challenges.
Sheer curation is an approach to
digital curationDigital curation is the selection, preservation, maintenance, and collection and archiving of digital assets.Digital curation is the process of establishing and developing long term repositories of digital assets for current and future reference by researchers, scientists, and historians, and...
where curation activities are quietly integrated into the normal work flow of those creating and managing data and other digital assets.
Digital curation is the selection,
preservationPreservation may mean:* Cultural Heritage Preservation, which includes:**Preservation , maintenance of artifacts and the intellectual record**Art conservation, the retention of cultural heritage for the future....
, maintenance, and collection and archiving of
digitalA digital system is a data technology that uses discrete values. By contrast, non-digital systems use a continuous range of values to represent information...
assets.
Digital curation is the process of establishing and developing long term repositories of digital assets for current and future reference by researchers, scientists, and historians, and scholars generally.
Aspects of digital curation
Digital curation entails:
- Collecting verifiable digital assets
- Providing digital asset search and retrieval
- Certification of the trustworthiness and integrity of the collection content
- Semantic and ontological continuity and comparability of the collection content
Challenges faced by digital curation
Significant and major challenges faced by digital curation are:
- Storage format evolution and obsolescence
- Rate of creation of new data and data sets
- Broad access and searching flexibility and variety
- Comparability of semantic and ontological
Ontology is the philosophical study of the nature of being, existence or reality in general, as well as of the basic categories of being and their relations...
definitions of data sets
Response to digital curation challenges
The challenges faced by digital curation are resulting in:
- specialised research institutions
- academic courses
- dedicated symposia
- peer reviewed technical and industry journals
to address the challenges.
Sheer Curation
Sheer curation is an approach to
digital curationDigital curation is the selection, preservation, maintenance, and collection and archiving of digital assets.Digital curation is the process of establishing and developing long term repositories of digital assets for current and future reference by researchers, scientists, and historians, and...
where curation activities are quietly integrated into the normal work flow of those creating and managing data and other digital assets. The word
sheerSheer may refer to:*Sheer curation, a lightweight approach to digital curation*Sheer Islands, Nunavut, Canada*Sheer Music, a record label*Sheer is a measure of longitudinal deck curvature in naval architecture...
is used to emphasis 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 .
Sheer curation depends on the hypothesis that good data and digital asset management at the point of creation and primary use is also good practice in preparation for sharing, publication and/or long-term preservation of these assets. Therefore, sheer curation attempts to identify and promote tools and good practices in local data and digital asset management in specific domains, where those tools and practices add immediate value to the creators and primary users of those assets. Curation can best be supported by identifying existing practices of sharing, stewardship and re-use that add value, and augmenting them in ways that both have short-term benefits, and in the longer term reduce risks to digital assets or provide new opportunities to sustain their long-term accessibility and re-use value.
The aim of sheer curation is to establish a solid foundation for other curation activities which may not directly benefit the creators and primary users of digital assets, especially those required to ensure long-term preservation. By providing this foundation, further curation activities may be carried out by specialists at appropriate institutional and organisation levels, whilst causing the minimum of interference to others.
A similar idea is
curation at source used in the context of Laboratory Information Management Systems LIMS. This refers more specifically to automatic recording of
metadataMetadata is "data about data", of any sort in any media. Metadata is text, voice, or image that describes what the audience wants or needs to see or experience. The audience could be a person, group, or software program...
or information about data at the point of capture, and has been developed to apply semantic web techniques to integrate laboratory instrumentation and documentation systems Sheer curation and curation-at-source can be contrasted with post hoc
digital preservationDigital preservation is the management of digital information over time. Preservation of digital information is widely considered to require more constant and ongoing attention than preservation of other media. This constant input of effort, time, and money to handle rapid technological and...
, where a project is initiated to preserve a collection of digital assets that have already been created and are beyond the period of their primary use.
See also
- Digital asset management
Digital asset management consists of management tasks and decisions surrounding ingesting, annotating, cataloguing, storage, retrieval and distribution of digital assets. digital photographs, animations, videos and music are samples of media asset management Digital asset management (DAM)...
- Digital Curation Centre
The Digital Curation Centre has been established to help solve the extensive challenges of digital preservation and digital curation and to lead research, development, advice, and support services for higher education institutions in the United Kingdom.Scientists, researchers and scholars across...
- Data format management
Data format management is the application of a systematic approach to the selection and use of the data formats used to encode information for storage on a computer....
- Digital obsolescence
Digital obsolescence is a situation where a digital resource is no longer readable because the physical media, the reader required to read the media, the hardware, or the software that runs on it, is no longer available. A prime example of this is the BBC Domesday Project...
- Digital preservation
Digital preservation is the management of digital information over time. Preservation of digital information is widely considered to require more constant and ongoing attention than preservation of other media. This constant input of effort, time, and money to handle rapid technological and...
External links