Digital Curation

Gillian Oliver, Ross Harvey

• Publisher: ALA Neal-Schuman
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9780838913857
• eBook ISBN:
  9780838914304
• Topic: Langues et linguistique
• Subtopic: Bibliothèques et sciences de l'information

As an in-depth explanation of the entire digital curation lifecycle, from creation to appraisal to preservation to organization/access to transformation, the first edition of this text set a benchmark for both thoroughness and clarity. Boasting the expert guidance of international authorities Oliver and Harvey, this revamped and expanded edition widens the scope to address continuing developments in the strategies, technological approaches, and activities that are part of this rapidly changing field. In addition to current practitioners, those pursuing a career as librarian, archivist, or records manager will find this definitive survey invaluable. Filled with up-to-date best practices, it covers such important topics as

• the scope and incentives of digital curation, detailing Digital Curation Centre's (DCC) lifecycle model as well as the Data Curation Continuum;   
• key requirements for digital curation, from description and representation to planning and collaboration;
• the value and utility of metadata;
• considering the needs of producers and consumers when creating an appraisal and selection policy for digital objects;
• the paradigm shift by institutions towards cloud computing and its impact on costs, storage, and other key aspects of digital curation;
• the quality and security of data;
• new and emerging data curation resources, including innovative digital repository software and digital forensics tools;
• mechanisms for sharing and reusing data, with expanded sections on open access, open data, and open standards initiatives; and
• processes to ensure that data are preserved and remain usable over time.

Useful as both a teaching text and day-to-day working guide, this book outlines the essential concepts and techniques that are crucial to preserving the longevity of digital resources.

Part I

Digital Curation

Scope and Incentives

The four chapters in part I provide a broad context for digital curation by introducing the main concepts and giving an overview of the field.

Chapter 1 indicates the reasons why digital curation is necessary, identifies what digital curation encompasses, suggests why you should be interested in digital curation, reviews the main incentives for digital curation, and examines who does digital curation and what tasks they carry out.

Chapter 2 focuses on the changing landscape in which librarians, archivists, researchers, and scholars work, requirements for different ways of working and new kinds of infrastructure, and the different skill sets for data curation.

Chapter 3 describes the application of conceptual models to digital curation. The Digital Curation Centre (DCC) Curation Lifecycle Model outlines the actions that comprise digital curation and presents these actions in graphic form. This Lifecycle Model is used as the structural basis of parts II and III of this book. The Open Archival Information System (OAIS) Reference Model is widely used as the basis for the design and implementation of digital archival systems. An alternative perspective, the Data Curation Continuum, is also introduced.

Chapter 4 describes in more detail the meaning of the term data and other related terms. Investigating the meaning of the term data is particularly important if a key question is to be answered satisfactorily: What exactly is it that we want to curate?

1

Introduction

In This Chapter

✓ Why There Is a Need for Digital Curation

✓ What Digital Curation Is

✓ Why We Should Be Interested in Digital Curation

✓ Incentives for Digital Curation

✓ Digital Curators

✓ Summary: Main Characteristics of Digital Curation

✓ References

Chapter 1 sets the scene for digital curation and argues that it is central to professional practice in all digital environments. It begins by indicating why digital curation is necessary, then identifies what it encompasses, suggests why an interest in digital curation is important, notes the main incentives for digital curation, and examines the tasks that comprise digital curation and who carries them out.

First, some definitions. Digital curation has been concisely defined as “the management and preservation of digital material to ensure accessibility over the long-term” (Abbott 2008).

The definitions of the terms data, digital object, and database used in this book come from the DCC Curation Lifecycle Model, the model upon which the structure of this book is based. Data is defined as “any information in binary digital form.” This definition is intentionally very broad and extends beyond the narrow association of the word with the outputs of scientific research. It includes digital objects and databases. Digital objects can be simple or complex. “Simple digital objects are discrete digital items; such as textual files, images or sound files, along with their related identifiers and metadata. Complex digital objects are discrete digital objects, made by combining a number of other digital objects, such as Web sites.” Databases are “structured collections of records or data stored in a computer system” (Digital Curation Centre 2004–2015). These definitions of the terms data, digital object, and database and their implications are expanded on in chapter 4.

Why There Is a Need for Digital Curation

The increasingly digital world that we all inhabit is changing the ways we work and play. It is a truism that this results in the generation of massive quantities of data in all areas of our lives. Furthermore, these quantities are increasing at significant rates. (This point is easy to illustrate. Consider the amount of personal data—word-processed documents, digital photographs, video files, and so on—you thought you needed to store ten, even only five, years ago, and compare that with the quantity you now think you need to store.) Perhaps you are a “self-quantifier,” collecting and measuring data (such as calories, steps, or heart rate) for enhanced health and well-being. Will you be able to look back and compare your activities and progress in five, ten, or twenty years’ time? Will the data you collect provide insight into your life and times for future generations? Data, whether personal or of any other kind, has certain characteristics that require it to be actively managed. It is at risk from many factors, including:

• Technology obsolescence—computers and software are updated frequently, often resulting in inability to access data.

• Technology fragility—digital objects can become inaccessible if only a small part of them is changed or corrupted.

• Lack of understanding about what constitutes good practice—digital curation is a new and still-developing field of practice, and much about what is needed to make it work is still unknown.

• Inadequate resources—libraries, archives, and museums are usually not resourced to carry out all they want to do; digital curation is not always given a high priority, and understanding what skill sets are required to make digital curation work is not fully known.

• Uncertainties about the best organizational infrastructures to achieve effective digital curation.

Digital curation is also necessary for many other reasons. Many of the current developments in the field—its practices, tools, storage facilities, and theoretical bases—are coming from the scientific, scholarly, and research communities. These communities have been rapidly accommodating new ways of working that rely increasingly on networked computing to link researchers and scholars around the world and to generate and share large—in some cases extremely large—data sets. The digital environment becomes the subject of study for a whole range of different disciplines. For example, to explore digital history the focus has to be on digital sources, which quite simply “completely changes the landscape of information and transaction costs that historians have traditionally faced” (Cohen et al. 2008, 455). In 2006 it was predicted that

not only will there be text, with hyperlinks to related literature or citations within the article, there will be links to the data reported within the article, through graphs, tables, illustrations, that will link to related datasets. (Friedlander and Adler 2006, 141)

The technologies to facilitate this are available now. But the prediction will only be fulfilled if stable digital curation is achieved.

These trends are often described in the context of science as the move from in vitro to in silico science—broadly speaking, from laboratory-based science to science based on data and performed using computers. These new contexts are collectively termed in the United States as cyberscholarship and elsewhere as e-science or e-scholarship. Chapter 2 describes these trends in more detail.

Cyberscholarship generates large quantities of data. These data are often unique and cannot be reproduced without major cost, if at all. An example is environmental data. The data may be generated in an extremely expensive experiment, and the cost alone means that the experiment cannot be reproduced: an example, perhaps extreme, is the massive amounts of data generated from runs of the world’s largest and highest energy particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider.

Cyberscholarship also requires that data be available for use and for reuse in the future. There are many reasons. Large data sets can be the basis of analysis by scholars around the world, so they must be available for access. Good research and scholarship are based on data that can be verified and built on to lead to new knowledge. Data may be records that have legal requirements: for example, financial records of business transactions may be required to be kept for periods of time specified in legislation. Some funding agencies require that data created during the course of activities they fund be made available for public use and reuse. The long-acknowledged roles of libraries and archives in preserving social memory should also be noted as a significant reason for ensuring data are available for use and reuse in the future, as social memory is increasingly held in digital form.

In nonacademic environments, digital curation is essential to support the aims of open government. The Open Government Declaration has been endorsed by over sixty countries (Open Government Partnership 2014) and promotes more transparent, responsive, accountable, and effective government. Underpinning these goals is information: “The government collects a vast quantity of high-quality data as part of its ordinary working activities. If this data is made open, it can have huge potential benefits.” (Open Government Data 2014). That the data needs to have integrity and be trustworthy almost goes without saying. That can only be achieved through data curation.

For all of these reasons, actively managing data is essential. Digital curation is a set of techniques that address the issues of data protection and risk management to ensure that the data are available and usable now and in the future.

What Digital Curation Is

The brief working definition of digital curation given at the beginning of this chapter comes from the DCC, the principal organization in the United Kingdom for developing and promoting digital curation concepts and practices. Another definition, this one from the United States, is provided by the Digital Curation Curriculum (DigCCurr) project based at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in a description of its interests. It expands on the DCC’s brief definition:

Our cultural heritage, modern scientific knowledge, and everyday commerce and government depend upon the preservation of reliable and authentic electronic records and digital objects. While digital data holds the promise of ubiquitous access, the inherent fragility and evanescence of media and files, the rapid obsolescence of software and hardware, the need for well-constructed file systems and metadata, and the intricacies of intellectual property rights place all of these materials at risk and offer little hope of longevity for information that is not intentionally preserved. A decade of work in digital preservation and access has resulted in an emerging and complex life-cycle constellation of strategies, technological approaches, and activities now termed “digital curation.” (DigCC...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Abbreviations
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Part I: Digital Curation: Scope and Incentives
• Part II: Key Requirements for Digital Curation
• Part III: The Digital Curation Lifecycle in Action
• About the Authors
• Index