This presentation outlines some steps for those new to digital curation (i.e., preserving and providing access to digital collections). This presentation was for the Digital Conversion Interest Group, sponsored by ALCTS-PARS, and was given at the American Library Association Conference in Anaheim, California on June 23, 2012. All content in this presentation is Creative Commons licensed (CC-BY-SA).

1. Adventures in Digital Curation
or, advice for the novice solo curator
Meg Meiman
University of Delaware
meiman@udel.edu
Digital Conversion Interest Group
ALCTS-PARS/ALA
June 23, 2012

2. What is (digital) curation?
 OED definition: [curation is] “the supervision by a
curator of a collection of preserved or exhibited
items.”
 Novice definition: maintaining preservation of
digital content into perpetuity (or until I die or quit
my job)
 LOC‟s definition: “the
selection, maintenance, collection and archiving of
digital assets, in addition to their preservation.”

3. From curation to stewardship
“ „Digital stewardship‟…pull[s] in the lifecycle
approach of curation along with research in digital
libraries and electronic records archiving, broadening
the emphasis from the e-science community on
scientific data to address all digital materials, while
continuing to emphasize digital preservation as a core
component of action.”
From Butch Lazorchak‟s “Digital Preservation, Digital Curation, Digital Stewardship: What‟s in (Some) Names?”
The Signal: Digital Preservation. Blog post. August 23, 2011.

4. Questions for consideration
 How do we prioritize what to keep for the historical
record? (a.k.a., the “triage” approach)
 In what formats should this content be maintained?
 How can we build digital curation into our current
preservation practices and daily workflow?
 Who else can help with all of this?

5. “Triage” -- assessing the scope of what you curate
 Data → senior theses by undergraduate researchers
 Metadata → information about undergraduate
researchers (names, project titles, faculty
mentors)
 Still more data → students‟ proposals for
summer and capstone research projects

9. Curating born-digital content
 Senior theses (data)
PDF/A
 requires embedded references (no hyperlinks)
 no video or audio files allowed
 Information about students (metadata)
MS Access
→XML files for immediate backup
→MySQL for long-term storage and access

10. Sheer curation (keep it lightweight)
“If we focus…on defining strategies for quietly
integrating curation support into the scientific work
flow, we may hope to make a far greater proportion of
the digital assets being created today available into the
future. We‟ve tentatively dubbed this approach “sheer
curation” – “sheer” as in lightweight and virtually
transparent….good data and digital asset
management at local levels is also good
practice in preparing for publication and/or
preservation of data and other digital assets.”
From Alistair Miles‟ “Zoological Case Studies in Digital Curation.”

11. “Front-end” curation
 Implement and refine guidelines for
content creators
→Theses submitted in PDF format
→All URLs in senior theses are typed out, with
full references included
→Multimedia theses are submitted in alternate
formats (CD/DVD)

12. “Back-end” curation
 Develop practices to incorporate curation
into existing workflow and timeline
late May → students upload theses to website
early June → download PDFs and save as
PDF/A
late June → save to network and external
hard drive
early July → save MS Access data as XML files
late July → migrate MS Access data to MySQL

13. Iterative cycle of digital curation
Assess (or re-assess)
available resources
Develop/refine “good Determine/refine
enough” curation scope of curated
practices content
Develop/refine
(Re-)prioritize what
guidelines for
to curate
content creators

14. Curating in a one-person operation
 What other avenues are available to
assist with digital curation?
Institutionalrepositories
College and university archives
Creators of digital content

16. Some (hopefully) useful take-aways
 Assess or re-assess available resources (IT support,
technology, staff, and funding)
 Determine / refine the scope of curated content
 Prioritize what you absolutely, positively have to curate
(get input from stakeholders, if appropriate)
 Develop /refine guidelines for content creators
(“front-end” curation)
 Develop / refine “good enough” curation practices to
incorporate into workflow (“back-end” curation)

17. Some sources that informed this talk
Lazorchak, Butch. “Digital Preservation, Digital Curation, Digital
Stewardship: What‟s in (Some) Names?” The Signal: Digital
Preservation. Blog post. August 23, 2011. (Full URL in handout.)
Miles, Alistair. “Zoological Case Studies in Digital Curation – DCC SCARP
/ImageStore.” June 6, 2007.
http://alimanfoo.wordpress.com/2007/06/
The Signal: Digital Preservation. Library of Congress.
http://blogs.loc.gov/digitalpreservation/
Ramalho, José, Miguel Ferreira, Luís Faria, and Rui Castro. “Relational
Database Preservation through XML modeling.” Extreme Markup
Languages 2007, Montréal, Quebec, August 7 – 10, 2007.
(Full URL in handout.)

18. I‟d like to thank the Academy…
 Martha Horan
 Kevin O‟Sullivan
 Dr. Lynnette Overby, my supervisor
 Digital Conversion Interest Group listserv
members
 You – thank you for your time and attention

19. Questions for consideration
 How do we prioritize the selection of born-digital
content for digital curation?
 In what formats should this content be maintained?
 How can we build digital curation into our current
preservation practices and daily workflow?
 Who else can help with all of this?