User:Acleaven/sandbox/sandbox-DC

Core Principles and Activities - (New) (This is the biggest need)
The term “digital curation” was first used in the e-science and biological science fields as a means of differentiating the additional suite of activities ordinarily employed by library and museum curators to add value to their collections and enable its reuse  from the smaller subtask of simply preserving the data, a significantly more concise archival task. Additionally, the historical understanding of the term “curation” demands more than simple care of the collection. A curator is expected to command academic mastery of the subject matter as a requisite part of appraisal and selection of assets and any subsequent adding of value to the collection through application of metadata.

Principles
There are five commonly accepted principles that govern the occupation of digital curation:
 * Management of the complete birth-to-retirement life cycle of the digital asset.
 * Evaluation and culling of assets for inclusion in the collection.
 * Apply preservation methods to strengthen the asset’s integrity and reusability for future users.
 * Act proactively throughout the asset life cycle to add value to both the digital asset and the collection.
 * Facilitate the appropriate degree of access to users.

Methodology
The Digital Curation Center offers the following step-by-step life cycle procedures for putting the above principles into practice:
 * Conceptualize: Consider what digital material you will be creating and develop storage options. Take into account websites, publications, email, among other types of digital output.
 * Create: Produce digital material and attach all relevant metadata, typically the more metadata the more accessible the information.
 * Access and use: Determine the level of accessibility for the range of digital material created. Some material may be accessible only by password and other material may be freely accessible to the public.
 * Appraise and select: Consult the mission statement of the institution or private collection and determine what digital data is relevant. There may also be legal guidelines in place that will guide the decision process for a particular collection.
 * Dispose: Discard any digital material that is not deemed necessary to the institution.
 * Ingest: Send digital material to the predetermined storage solution. This may be an archive, repository or other facility.
 * Preservation action: Employ measures to maintain the integrity of the digital material.
 * Reappraise: Reevaluate material to ensure that is it still relevant and is true to its original form.
 * Store: Secure data within the predetermined storage facility.
 * Access and reuse: Routinely check that material is still accessible for the intended audience and that the material has not been compromised through multiple uses.
 * Transform: If desirable or necessary the material may be transferred into a different digital format.

Related terms
The term "digital curation" is sometimes used interchangeably with terms such as "digital preservation" and "digital archiving". While digital preservation does focus a significant degree of energy on optimizing reusability, preservation remains a subtask to the concept of digital archiving, which is in turn a subtask of digital curation. For example, archiving is a part of curation, but so are subsequent tasks such as themed collection building which is not considered an archival task. Similarly, preservation is a part of archiving, but so are the important tasks of selection and appraisal that are not necessarily part of preservation.

Data curation is another term that is often used interchangeably with digital curation, however common usage of the two terms differs. While “data” is a more all-encompassing term that can be used generally to indicate anything recorded in binary form, the term “data curation” is most common in scientific parlance and usually refers to accumulating and managing information relative to the process of research. So, while documents and other discrete digital assets are technically a subset of the broader concept of data, in the context of scientific vernacular digital curation represents a broader purview of responsibilities than data curation due to its interest in preserving and adding value to digital assets of any kind.

Underestimation of human labor costs   (New)
Modern tools for program planning often underestimate the amount of human labor costs required for adequate digital curation of large collections. As a result cost-benefit assessments often paint an inaccurate picture of both the amount of work involved, and the true cost to the institution for both successful outcomes and failures.

Standardization and coordination between institutions (New)
An absence of coordination across different sectors of society and industry in areas such as the standardization of semantic and ontological definitions, and in forming partnerships for proper stewardship of assets has resulted in a lack of interoperability between institutions, and a partial breakdown in digital curation practice from the standpoint of the ordinary user.

Digitization of analog materials (Existing)
The process of converting printed resources into digital collections has been epitomized to some degree by librarians and related specialists. For example, The Digital Curation Centre is claimed to be a "world leading centre of expertise in digital information curation" that assists higher education research institutions in such conversions.

New representational formats (Existing)
For some topics, knowledge is embodied in forms that have not been conducive to print, such as how choreography of dance or of the motion of skilled workers or artisans is difficult to encode. New digital approaches such as 3D holograms and other computer-programmed expressions are developing.

For mathematics, it seems possible for a new common language to be developed that would express mathematical ideas in ways that can be digitally stored, linked, and made accessible. The Global Digital Mathematics Library is a project to define and develop such a language.

Storage format evolution and obsolescence (category existing/explanation new)
The rapid progression of technology occasionally makes it necessary to migrate digital asset holdings from one file format to another in order to mitigate the dangers of hardware and software obsolescence which would render the asset unusable.

Rate of creation of new data and data sets (category existing/explanation new)
The ever lowering cost, and increasing prevalence of entirely new categories of technology has lead to a quickly growing flow of new data sets. These come from well established sources such as business and government, but the trend is also driven by new styles of sensors becoming embedded in more areas of modern life. This is particularly true of private citizens, whose production of digital assets is no longer relegate strictly to work. Private citizens now create wider ranges of digital assets, including videos, photos, location data, purchases, and fitness tracking data, just to name a few, and share them in wider ranges of social platforms.

Accessibility (New)
The ability of the intended user community to access the repository’s holdings is of equal importance to all the preceding curatorial tasks. This must take into account not only the user community’s format and communication preferences, but also a consideration of communities that should not have access for various legal or privacy reasons.

New Approaches - (Existing)
See also (Existing)
 * Channelization (Existing)
 * Sheer Curation (Existing)

References (New references added)

External links (New links added)