Digital curation is the active involvement in the management, including the preservation, of digital resources for future use.
“What is Digital Curation?” Digital Curation Institute , 2014
As Director of the Digital Curation Institute since 2014, I have aimed to bring together the wide range of perspectives on this subject that are present at our Faculty. During my sabbatical, my colleague Costis Dallas directs the DCI.
My own recent research in digital curation focuses on what I call data-intensive curation. By that I mean the rising centrality of data-intensive, computation-intensive forms of digital objects and workflows that are now commonplace in many areas, including beyond the traditional spaces of digital curation. For example, I am exploring new forms of data-intensive knowledge work that arise in the data-intensive curation of sustainability assessments in the financial industry.
Previous work covers a range of questions in this area:
- In a recent article, I examined the metaphorical nature of the term ‘digital object‘ (this article received the W. Kaye Lamb Prize)
- Together with my student Emily Maemura, DCI Fellow Ian Milligan and UofT Librarian Nich Worby, we developed new ways to think about the provenance of web archives
- As part of the BenchmarkDP project, we studied the design and use of assessment frameworks in digital curation using a Design Science approach
- As part of the same project, we used the longitudinal data sets available in web archives to develop a lifecycle model of format technology and its evolution. The results are discussed in this article. Here is an example:
All this work is supported by a John Evans Leaders Fund grant that I received to build and operate a lab and computing infrastructure for data-intensive curation research. Some of it builds quite directly on my earlier work in digital preservation.