icegov2012 proceedings

Digital curation has served as an umbrella concept that spans a
diversity of professions, institutions and sectors. “Digital
curation” is less wedded to specific institution types than phrases
such as “digital archives” or “digital libraries.” It also reflects a
tendency toward increasing convergence across different types of
institutions, which is driven in large part by technological changes
and considerations [12].
Digital curation is a recent (and useful) phrase to designate a set
of opportunities for cross-institutional and cross-disciplinary
engagement that have been evolving for decades. We believe that
individuals in the public sector can benefit from a better
understanding of advances in digital curation. Conversely, we
believe that experts in electronic governance have a great deal to
contribute to the evolving dialogue around digital curation. It is
our hope that this ICEGOV tutorial will help to catalyze such
connections.
3. BACKGROUND TO THIS TUTORIAL
Over the past decade, we have developed and administered a wide
range of professional educational offerings in digital curation.
Tibbo hosted the Humanities Advanced Technology and
Information Institute week-long digitization workshops in March
2002, May 2003, and May 2004[1]. Since 2006, we have
administered several digital curation education and professional
engagement projects funded by the Institute for Museum and
Library Services (IMLS): (1) Preserving Access to Our Digital
Future: Building an International Digital Curation Curriculum
(DigCCurr) [2], (2) DigCCurr II [3], (3) Educating Stewards of
Public Information for the 21st Century (ESOPI-21) [4], (4)
Closing the Digital Curation Gap (CDCG) [5], and Educating
Stewards of the Public Information Infrastructure (ESOPI 2 ) [6].
These projects have generated a detailed curriculum framework
[7], course modules, full graduate courses [8], week-long
continuing education institutes for professionals [9] and numerous
practical engagement opportunities through paid fellowships. 1 In
April 2010, the SILS faculty approved a new Graduate Certificate
in Digital Curation [11].
As part of the DigCCurr II project, we have offered a week-long
digital curation institute for working professionals every year
since 2009 [8]. The first three years of the institute were
supported through funds from the IMLS. This year’s institute
(2012) was funded solely through participant registration fees.
The Royal Library of Denmark asked us to offer the institute for
them in Copenhagen, which we administered in June 2012.
This ICEGOV tutorial also builds upon "An Introduction to
Digital Curation for Public Records Professionals," a workshop
that we offered at the joint annual meeting of the National
Association of Government Archives and Records Administrators
1 DigCCurr and ESOPI Fellows have had field placement in
institutions including the National Archives and Records
Administration (NARA); the North Carolina State Archives; the
town of Chapel Hill, NC; Orange County, NC; NC Live; UNC-
CH’s University Archives; the Odum Institute for Research in
Social Science, and the Environmental Finance Center of the
UNC School of Government.
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(NAGARA) and Council of State Archivists (CoSA) on July 16
2011 in Nashville, Tennessee.
4. OUTLINE AND CONTENT
Digital curation brings a wide array of opportunities and
challenges. Opportunities include wider access, integrated access,
representation of a wider range of human experience, persistence
through redundant copying, economies of scale, and enrollment of
collective expertise. Challenges include bit rot, obsolescence,
social inertia, technology monitoring, limited intellectual control,
complex access environments, and various barriers to conveying
meaning over time.
Digital resources are composed of interacting components that can
be considered and accessed at different levels of representation
(e.g. bitstream, through a filesystem; files as rendered through
specific applications; records composed of multiple files; abstract
“works”; larger aggregations such as web sites) [21]. Accessing
and using a document stored as a digital object, requires the
coordinated operation of various hardware and software
components (e.g. storage medium, peripheral devices, operating
system, device drivers, application software). To ensure integrity
and future use, digital curation requires numerous decisions
regarding treatment at multiple levels of representation.
The challenges associated with digital curation are not only
technical but also institutional, economic and political. In order
for digital collections to be sustainable over time, the actors
responsible for curation must continuously have appropriate
expertise, resources, and a political/institutional mandate to carry
out the work required. Given the cost and complexity of digital
curation, as well as the potential to exploit the rich sets of
relationships across individual collections, coordination of work
across social boundaries is also important.
When acquiring, managing and providing access to materials,
professionals must consider various norms, laws, codes of ethics,
policies, procedures, and personal values. As they address
curation of digital information, they are increasingly discovering
“policy vacuums” [18] in which there is no existing guidance on
new issues, and “latent ambiguities” [19] 2 in established guidance.
Digital curation requires clear articulation of policies, procedures,
and practices in ways that were not previously necessary.
In order to address the above considerations, the ICEGOV tutorial
will be composed of the following components:
• Welcome, introductions and logistics
• Overview of digital curation definition, scope and main
functions
• Trustworthiness and assessment
• The many levels of representation in digital materials –
implications for curation
• Lifelong learning for digital curation
The content of this tutorial will address various elements of all
four areas of the “Lifecycle of Electronic Governance Initiatives”
identified in the ICEGOV call: planning, architecture,
implementation and operations. The tutorial is designed to expose
participants to a wide range of professional and strategic issues
2 Lessig borrows the term “latent ambiguity” from [20].