I have been volunteering at the Maryland State Archives for a few months and the Director of the Special Collections department recently posed a question said she’d asked of each of the many MLIS students who have worked there over the past few years, always getting a different answer. The question: “How do you define digital curation?” Having so recently revisited Yakel’s article “Digital Curation” (2007), I gave the definition from the text almost verbatim: “Digital curation is the active involvement of information professionals in the management, including the preservation, of digital data for future use.” The Director nodded, pleased with this answer, although she wasn’t specifically familiar with this definition from Yakel. She also said she hadn’t heard this exact answer in previous conversations. I suspect this answer appealed to her because its first emphasis requires active engagement with information professionals. In an archive that manages both physical and digital collections, with a great deal of legacy technology (for better or for worse), within an often slow-moving government institutional context, she did not need to ever have heard of Yakel to appreciate the strength of the definition.  I share this anecdote because I think it represents an interesting interaction between theory and practice, and highlighting the difference between defining and doing an activity.

So in comparing that definition to the one currently given by the Wikipedia article: “Digital curation is the selection, preservation, maintenance, collection and archiving of digital asset,” we encounter one example of a digital library topic area on Wikipedia that is generally representative of the field but could use more nuance and support. Furthermore, I agree with the previous blog post that this article relies too heavily on information from the Digital Curation Centre, which while strong and valid, may represent a UK-specific viewpoint and stand to benefit from more discussion of fundamentals from a variety of sources. By contrast, the Digital Preservation article seems both deeply and broadly researched, with sufficient details and citations to support each section. (I think we already mentioned that the “start-class” designation here is confusing.)

For my article assignment, I’m excited to be working on Community archives. There are loads of great ideas listed on the Talk page for potential new content. The section called “Issues” is particularly rich:

• Digitization as a way to build or link community archives
• Digital divide re: community members accessing their own material
• Archival training
• Community representation in the profession
• Ethics of access
• Capacity challenges (i.e. funding, disaster planning)

Furthermore, I have identified four other sources to evaluate from the Intro to Archives and Digital Curation Fall 2017 syllabus. Also, since I questioned the use of one of the articles (Woodward) as a citation, I will examine whether that one is worth replacing. I did check to see if anyone responded to my Talk comment about that, but have not seen any answers yet.