DCC Briefing Paper: What is digital curation?

Abstract

There is an ever-increasing amount of data being created in digital formats, through the digitisation of existing analogue information and the creation of new 'born-digital' data from the sciences, arts, and humanities sectors. As well as generating new digital data, scientists, researchers, and scholars have begun to rely on digital content created by others. These data are at risk from technological obsolescence and from the inherent fragility of digital media. Digital curation is the management and preservation of digital data over the long-term.

All activities involved in managing data from planning its creation, best practice in digitisation and documentation, and ensuring its availability and suitability for discovery and re-use in the future are part of digital curation. Digital curation can also include managing vast data sets for daily use, for example ensuring that they can be searched and continue to be readable. Digital curation is therefore applicable to a large range of professional situations from the beginning of the information life-cycle to the end; digitisers, metadata creators, funders, policy-makers, and repository managers to name a few examples.