Digital curation

Digital curation is the selection, preservation, maintenance, collection and archiving of digital assets.Digital curation establishes, maintains and adds value to repositories of digital data for present and future use. This is often accomplished by archivists, librarians, scientists, historians, and scholars. Enterprises are starting to use digital curation to improve the quality of information and data within their operational and strategic processes. Successful digital curation will mitigate digital obsolescence, keeping the information accessible to users indefinitely. Progressively, digital curation acts as an umbrella concept that includes many subsets appearing as related terms such as digital asset management, data curation, digital preservation, and electronic records management. Digital curation is the selection, preservation, maintenance, collection and archiving of digital assets.Digital curation establishes, maintains and adds value to repositories of digital data for present and future use. This is often accomplished by archivists, librarians, scientists, historians, and scholars. Enterprises are starting to use digital curation to improve the quality of information and data within their operational and strategic processes. Successful digital curation will mitigate digital obsolescence, keeping the information accessible to users indefinitely. Progressively, digital curation acts as an umbrella concept that includes many subsets appearing as related terms such as digital asset management, data curation, digital preservation, and electronic records management. The term curation in the past commonly referred to museum and library professionals. It has since been applied to interaction with social media including compiling digital images, web links and movie files. 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 “curator” 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.