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The purpose of this article is to provide an overview of development and recent focus on digital curation and ties it to larger cyberinfrastructure initiatives.

Provides a useful viewpoint on the development and recent focus on digital curation.

Digital curation is the active involvement of information professionals in the management, including the preservation, of digital data for future use. While there have been people doing different aspects of data curation and digital preservation for decades, recent events have brought a number of ideas, organizations, and individuals together to focus more intently on digital curation. Reports in the US by the National Science Foundation and the American Council of Learned Societies and in the UK by Dr Liz Lyon of UKOLN have pointed out the aspects of digital curation which need to be in place to ensure that digital objects can be maintained, preserved, and remain available for future use. These reports along with increased research focus at conferences and the emergence of new educational programs have led to the emergence of digital curation and made digital curators a new entry into the information professions. Increasingly, digital curation is becoming an umbrella concept that includes digital preservation, data curation, electronic records management, and digital asset management.

This article discusses and defines digital curation and notes how this theme has permeated in recent reports, conferences, and educational offerings.

The article synthesizes current digital curation efforts and helps to define this new concept for information professionals.

The purpose of this paper is to present a perspective on the development of digital curation education and practice in museums in the USA.

Methods used include: a historical overview of the development of digital curation, originally as a field of practice – primarily in the sciences – and then as a field of study; a case study of the adaptation of a digital curation curriculum (DigCCurr) framework developed in schools of library and information science (LIS) to a museum studies program; and a discussion of trends in digital curation practices in museums.

The case study (the digital curation certificate program of Johns Hopkins University’s museum studies program) describes a successful adaptation of the LIS DigCCurr framework in a museum studies program.

Findings could help to advance the museum field through the integration of digital curation education, practice and research.

By adopting and supporting digital curation practices, education and research, museums can reach and engage more online users seeking information about museum collections. More online users may also become onsite visitors.

There is little existing literature on digital curation education in museum studies programs.

This study aims to present the results of a survey of library and information science (LIS) schools' websites used to determine if the number of data curation courses offered is adequate to address the needs of the so‐called “data deluge”. Many authors have identified a gap in the education of LIS students for data curation.

This study surveyed the websites of LIS schools in North America to identify data curation courses. It reviewed and analyzed course descriptions, objectives and syllabi (when available) as well as compared course objectives, requirements, topics, assignments, and projects of the identified courses.

Of the 52 LIS schools in North America's websites examined in this study, 16 institutions offered courses on data curation. The increase in the number of schools offering courses in data curation showed that LIS schools are responding to the demand for data curation professionals. More LIS schools need to add data curation to their curriculum. LIS schools currently offering data curation courses should continue to work together to determine the optimal course objectives and learning outcomes.

Although there are several papers focused on particular data curation programs at a few universities, there are no papers that provide an overall view of the status of data curation education in higher education institutions today. This research will be of value and interest to LIS educators and professionals to determine if there is adequate education in place and to identify and evaluate the current state of data curation education.

The purpose of this paper is to define and describe digital curation, an emerging field of theory and practice in the information professions that embraces digital preservation, data curation, and management of information assets over their lifecycle. It dissects key issues and debates in the area while arguing that digital curation is a vital strategy for dealing with the so-called data deluge.

This paper explores digital curation’s potential to provide an improved return on investment in data work.

A vital counterweight to the problem of data loss, digital curation also adds value to trusted data assets for current and future use. This paper unpacks data, the research enterprise, the roles and responsibilities of digital curation professionals, the data lifecycle, metadata, sharing and reuse, scholarly communication (cyberscholarship, publication and citation, and rights), infrastructure (archives, centers, libraries, and institutional repositories), and overarching issues (standards, governance and policy, planning and data management plans, risk management, evaluation, and metrics, sustainability, and outreach).

A critical discussion that focusses on North America and the UK, this paper synthesizes previous findings and conclusions in the area of digital curation. It has value for digital curation professionals and researchers as well as students in library and information science who may deal with data in the future. This paper helps potential stakeholders understand the intellectual and practical framework and the importance of digital curation in adding value to scholarly (science, social science, and humanities) and other types of data. This paper suggests the need for further empirical research, not only in exploring the actual sharing and reuse practices of various sectors, disciplines, and domains, but also in considering the the data lifecycle, the potential role of archivists, funding and sustainability, outreach and awareness-raising, and metrics.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the concept of professional competency in current digital curation literature through the lens of competency theories in management science and organizational studies. This paper also aims to provide recommendations to articulate and expand professional competencies in future digital curation research and professional education.

The outcomes presented in this paper are based on a multi-disciplinary literature review and a qualitative content analysis. The literature review explores theoretical foundations of professional competency in management science and organizational studies and how the concept of professional competency is used in digital curation literature. The content analysis scrutinizes 16 digital curation publications that have discussed professional competency, with an in-depth examination of seven empirical studies in these publications.

The findings include: the concept of professional competency is inconsistently used in digital curation literature, the digital curation literature exhibits disparate coverage of different types of professional competencies, and the digital curation empirical studies often narrowly operationalize the concept of professional competency but the empirical studies using multiple or in-depth qualitative methods yield more comprehensive findings reflecting a broader scope of the concept.

Although past research focused on the competencies required for digital curation, there is no research scrutinizing the conceptual construct of professional competency in the digital curation literature. This paper will be of value to digital curation researchers and educators to better determine the competencies needed for digital curators as an emerging profession.

Digital curation addresses the technical, administrative and financial ecology required to ensure that digital information remains accessible and usable over the long term. The purpose of this paper is to trace digital curation’s disciplinary emergence and examine its position within the information sciences domain in terms of theoretical principles, using a case study of developments in the UK and the USA.

Theoretical principles regarding disciplinary development and the identity of information science as a discipline are applied to a case study of the development of digital curation in the UK and the USA to identify the maturity of digital curation and its position in the information science gamut.

Digital curation is identified as a mature discipline which is a sub-meta-discipline of information science. As such digital curation has reach across all disciplines and sub-disciplines of information science and has the potential to become the overarching paradigm.

These findings could influence digital curation’s development from applied discipline to profession within both its educational and professional domains.

The disciplinary development of digital curation within dominant theoretical models has not hitherto been articulated.

Collaboratively annotating digital texts allow users to add valued information, share ideas and create knowledge. Most importantly, annotated content can help users obtain a deeper and broader understanding of a text compared to digital content without annotations. This work proposes a novel collaborative annotation system (CAS) with four types of multimedia annotations including text annotation, picture annotation, voice annotation and video annotation which can embedded into any HTML Web pages to enable users to collaboratively add and manage annotations on these pages and provide a shared mechanism for discussing shared annotations among multiple users. By applying the CAS in a mashup on static HTML Web pages, this study aims to discuss the applications of CAS in digital curation, crowdsourcing and digital humanities to encourage existing strong relations among them.

This work adopted asynchronous JavaScript (Ajax) and a model-view-controller framework to implement a CAS with reading annotation tools for knowledge creating, archiving and sharing services, as well as applying the implemented CAS to support digital curation, crowdsourcing and digital humanities. A questionnaire survey method was used to investigate the ideas and satisfaction of visitors who attended a digital curation with CAS support in the item dimensions of the interactivity with displayed products, the attraction and the content absorption effect. Also, to collect qualitative data that may not be revealed by the questionnaire survey, semi-structured interviews were performed at the end of the digital curation exhibition activity. Additionally, the effects of the crowdsourcing and digital humanities with CAS support on collecting and organizing ideas and opinions for historical events and promoting humanity research outcomes were considered as future works because they all need to take a long time to investigate.

Based on the questionnaire survey, this work found that the digital curation with CAS support revealed the highest rating score in terms of the item dimension of attraction effect. The result shows applying CAS to support digital curation is practicable, novel and interesting to visitors. Additionally, this work also successfully applied the developed CAS to crowdsourcing and digital humanities so that the two research fields may be brought into a new ground.

Based on the CAS, this work developed a novel digital curation approach which has a high degree of satisfaction on attraction effect to visitors, an innovative crowdsourcing platform that combined with a digital archive system to efficiently gather collective intelligence to solve the difficult problems of identifying digital archive contents and a high potential digital humanity research mode that can assist humanities scholars to annotate the texts with distinct interpretation and viewpoints on an ancient map, as well as discuss with other humanities scholars to stimulate discussion on more issues.

The purpose of this study was to identify the digital curation practices in institutional repositories (IRs) in South India.

A voluntary survey was conducted among the IR managers of 23 South Indian IRs, and the response rate was 87%.

This study found that the active participation of South Indian IRs was only seen in a few digital curation activities. However, of the 33 digital curation activities analyzed, the active participation of repositories was only seen in ten digital curation activities. The performance of preservation activities was extremely low, and disagreements were recorded by the survey participants toward several digital curation activities. The most disagreed digital curation activities were emulation and cease data curation. All the participants had assigned metadata and allowed file downloads in their repositories. Raman Research Institute had provided a good number of digital curation services in their IR.

This is an in-depth study investigating the digital curation practice currently underway in South Indian IRs, and the researcher could not find similar studies in this niche.

The terms “digital curation” and “cyberinfrastructure” have been coined in the last decade to describe distinct but related concepts of how data can be managed, preserved, manipulated and made available for long‐term use. This paper aims to examine these.

The paper considers the origins of both terms and the communities that have been engaged with each of them, traces the development of the present digital environment in the USA and considers what this may mean for the future.

The paper reveals that each term has important attributes that contribute to a comprehensive understanding of the digital knowledge universe.

The paper reveals information about the development of digital preservation.

Experiential learning incorporated into library and information science education in the form of a practical placement has long been accepted as important. However, it is not always possible for students to undertake a traditional internship because of constraints associated with the physical location of internship sites. The purpose of this paper is to explore virtual alternatives, in the context of digital curation.

Surveys exploring the internship experience were conducted of students and supervisors, leading to the development of a pilot study. In addition, discussions were held with possible supervisors in a country with a small population, faced with the challenge of building capability in digital curation.

The concept of a virtual internship is entirely appropriate given the focus on digital tools, information and systems in digital curation. A new dimension to the traditional internship experience is the potential for sharing expertise internationally, in diverse settings.

Although the paper describes activities taking place through the School of Library & Information Science at San Jose State University, the findings can be used to justify virtual internship programs and develop strategies to be employed by other Schools at the University and other Universities within and outside the USA.

This paper includes implications for the development of successful virtual internship programs on the Master's degree level, including those for students preparing for careers in digital curation.

The paper provides insight into the practical issues associated with incorporating experiential learning into digital curation curricula and signals the potential for approaching internships from a global perspective.