I don’t necessarily think Yakel and Dallas’s views differ but rather I see Dallas expanding the definition and territory of what is digital curation. With eight years passing being Yakel’s “Digital curation” article in 2007, and Dallas’s “Digital curation beyond the ‘wild frontier’” in 2015, the world of technical shifted greatly in what institutions, offices, and the public can create, preserve, and access. Further, how individuals are devising their own curation and preservation methods which contributing their knowledge and expertise to LAM institutions such as through crowd-sourcing.

I re-read Yakel’s article and my understanding is this article is trying to gather all the floating definitions of what is digital curation in the LAM field at the time. Yakel easily and succinctly walks us through the evolution of terminology and how institutions apply terms and apply definitions, and indicates that “digital curation is becoming the umbrella term [emphasis mine].”  I emphasize “is becoming” because I think it’s notable she’s observing what she sees happening—isn’t making a definite statement that it is an umbrella term. I think people, myself included, took up this definition because it’s a very understandable way to communicate an ever-morphing realm, and it grounds us in a way to think about digital curation as we further incorporate archives, audiences, users, digital assets, and digital tools. To that end, it was in the same year, 2007, that Ghetu Krause and Yakel published “The Polar Bear Expedition Digital Collections Next Generation Finding Aid,” a paper that discusses the reimagining of finding aids by using web 2.0 tools to collaborate with public users and professional-amateurs. Certainly, 11 years later, the definition can be expanded, as Yakel’s own research has shown, but I wasn’t quite convinced there needs to be an “alternative” approach. Dallas himself notes, “ambiguity still persists as to what digital curation is, what it is of, how it manifests itself, and what may be its distinct identity as a domain of intellectual inquiry and professional competence.” (p. 423)

I also found it perplexing that Dallas writes,

pace [in contrary to the opinion of] Yakel, who views “the idea of curatorship as a passive activity (which is how it sometimes is seen when dealing with analog materials)…” (p. 426)

This wasn’t a view she was expressing. The full sentence Yakel wrote is,

The focus on active intervention may be in response to the idea of curatorship as a passive activity (which is how it is sometimes seen when dealing with analog materials).”(Yakel, p. 338)

Perhaps I misreading his intention (I did have to look up “pace” to try to fully comprehend what he was setting forth), but this struck me as an odd way to posit an argument.

As for our project, Dallas’s ideas on pragmatism will be good to carry with us as we work to build a inventory system for a range of users, and asking for their knowledge and expertise to inform how we design the system.