Digital curation

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Digital curation, broadly interpreted, is about maintaining and adding value to a trusted body of digital information for current and future use.

Digital curation encompasses all of the actions needed to maintain digitised and born-digital objects and data over their entire life-cycle and over time for current and future generations of users. Implicit in this definition are the processes of digital archiving and digital preservation but it also includes all the processes needed for good data creation and management, and the capacity to add value to data to generate new sources of information and knowledge.

As an example that digital curation is more than and potentially very different from digital preservation, consider the curation of e-mails. Intrinsically easy to preserve over a long period (attachments aside) because of their well-defined structure (RFC2822) and in-built metadata, the issues of curating e-mails relate much more to managing their place as corporate records, or their assured destruction, than to their preservation.

Digital curation, then, is a medium to long term process where resources are managed, cleaned and corrected, associated with metadata that shows their context, meaning and value, annotated and discussed, and where appropriate preserved or reliably disposed of.

Long-term curation and preservation of digital resources is seen as a challenge which is difficult if not impossible for individual organisations to resolve on their own, due to the complexity and scale of the challenges involved. Curation and long-term preservation of digital resources is of increasing importance for many different sectors, such as education, research, business and government. Digital resources from these sectors are growing in volume, type, and complexity at a staggering rate. The investment made in producing these resources must be protected, for re-creating data is not simply expensive; in many cases (such as climatology) it can be impossible.

Digital curation is the key to the sustainability, reproducibility, and re-use of reliable and trusted digital resources.