The Art of Digital Curation

Artists have long engaged with digital and networked technologies in critical and creative ways to explore both new art forms and novel ways of disseminating artworks. Net-based artworks are often created with the intent to circulate outside traditional institutional spaces, and many are shared via artist-run platforms that involve curatorial practices distinct from those of museums or commercial galleries. This article focuses on a particular artist-run platform called Paper-Thin, characterizing the activities involved in managing the platform as digital curation in a polysemous sense – as both the curation of digital artworks and the stewardship of digital information in a complex technological ecosystem. While scholars and cultural heritage professionals have developed innovative preservation strategies for digital and new media artworks housed in institutional collections, the ongoing care of artworks shared through networked alternative spaces is largely carried out co-operatively by the artists and curators of these platforms. Drawing on Howard Becker’s sociological theory of art worlds as networks of co-operative actors, this article describes the patterns of co-operative work involved in creating, exhibiting, and then caring for Net-based art. The article outlines the importance, for cultural heritage professionals, of understanding the digital-curation practices of artists, as these artist-run networked platforms demonstrate emergent approaches to the stewardship of digital culture that move beyond a custodial paradigm.

Exploring Curation as a Path Towards Decolonizing Education

As part of my Doctor of Education program, I was asked to study Dr. Marie Battiste’s (2017) book Decolonizing Education: Nourishing the Learning Spirit. In response to that assignment, I built a WordPress site as a way to experiment with crossing boundaries of physical and digital places, between different Indigenous knowledges and notions of teaching and learning. While building the site, I looked for localized examples of Battiste’s concepts and ideas among the Inuvialuit, the Indigenous group with which I am the most familiar, in what became an exploration of the wonderful work being done in the Inuvialuit Settlement Region to preserve the culture and decolonize ways of thinking. I knew some of these resources existed, but was surprised by the depth and variety of materials available. In this paper, I present that website as an experimental example of digital curation that stitches together the book, a series of digital artefacts found via Internet searches and my own reflections on those artefacts. While building it, I did not seek out answers but instead explored the possibilities of curation as a path to decolonization education. The resulting site design is both personal and incomplete. Through this process, I hope to open generative cracks that provoke new ways of thinking about digital curation as a means of supporting active engagement in the complicated and necessary conversations regarding decolonization.

Metadata in the Digital Library

The range of metadata needed to run a digital library and preserve its collections in the long term is much more extensive and complicated than anything in its traditional counterpart. It includes the same 'descriptive' information which guides users to the resources they require but must supplement this with comprehensive 'administrative' metadata: this encompasses technical details of the files that make up its collections, the documentation of complex intellectual property rights and the extensive set needed to support its preservation in the long-term. To accommodate all of this requires the use of multiple metadata standards, all of which have to be brought together into a single integrated whole.<br><br><i>Metadata in the Digital Library </i>is a complete guide to building a digital library metadata strategy from scratch, using established metadata standards bound together by the markup language XML. The book introduces the reader to the theory of metadata and shows how it can be applied in practice. It lays out the basic principles that should underlie any metadata strategy, including its relation to such fundamentals as the digital curation lifecycle, and demonstrates how they should be put into effect. It introduces the XML language and the key standards for each type of metadata, including Dublin Core and MODS for descriptive metadata and PREMIS for its administrative and preservation counterpart. Finally, the book shows how these can all be integrated using the packaging standard METS. Two case studies from the Warburg Institute in London show how the strategy can be implemented in a working environment.<br><br>The strategy laid out in this book will ensure that a digital library's metadata will support all of its operations, be fully interoperable with others and enable its long-term preservation. It assumes no prior knowledge of metadata, XML or any of the standards that it covers. It provides both an introduction to best practices in digital library metadata and a manual for their practical implementation.

Where There's a Will, There's a Way: In-House Digitization of an Oral History Collection in a Lone-Arranger Situation

Analog audio materials present unique preservation and access challenges for even the largest libraries. These challenges are magnified for smaller institutions where budgets, staffing, and equipment limit what can be achieved. Because in-house migration to digital of analog audio is often out of reach for smaller institutions, the choice is between finding the room in the budget to out-source a project, or sit by and watch important materials decay. Cost is the most significant barrier to audio migration. Audio preservation labs can charge hundreds or even thousands of dollars to migrate analog to digital. Top-tier audio preservation equipment is equally expensive. When faced with the decomposition of an oral history collection recorded on cassette tape, one library decided that where there was a will, there was a way. The College of Education One-Room Schoolhouse Oral History Collection consisted of 247 audio cassettes containing interviews with one-room school house teachers from 68 counties in Kansas. The cassette tapes in this collection were between 20-40 years old and generally inaccessible for research due to fear the tapes could be damaged during playback. This case study looks at how a single Digital Curation Librarian with no audio digitization experience migrated nearly 200 hours of audio to digital using a $40 audio converter from Amazon and a campus subscription to Adobe Audition. This case study covers the decision to digitize the collection, the digitization process including audio clean-up, metadata collection and creation, presentation of the collection in CONTENTdm, and final preservation of audio files. The project took 20 months to complete and resulted in significant lessons learned that have informed decisions regarding future audio conversion projects.

The Global Medieval Sourcebook: Creating a Sustainable Digital Anthology of Medieval Texts and Translations

This paper introduces the Global Medieval Sourcebook (GMS), an online repository of medieval texts and translations with an open network of contributors. Drawing on our experience developing and building this project in two phases over six years, we reflect on questions regarding editorial, curatorial, and translation practices, and on technical issues involved in the preparation, display, and preservation of texts for online publication. As an example of a scholar-led digital project, the trajectory of the GMS has broad relevance for scholars planning digital curation work of their own. In particular, it offers a salutary example of the infrastructural barriers to sustaining collaborative digital work and a possible model for preserving a concluded project.

Diversity, Social Justice, and Accessibility in Grenzenlos Deutsch: Reflections on Digital Curation

Grenzenlos Deutsch ( GD) is an open educational resource (OER) that functions as a digital archive. Considerations of equity, social justice, and accessibility inform decision-making and workflow at all stages of fashioning the GD curriculum as a no-cost alternative to traditional beginning German textbooks. In this essay, six members of the GD team reflect on digital curation, considering how the team’s collective identities, values, and instructional goals intersect with the processes of creating and curating the curriculum, particularly the production and preservation of audiovisual material such as images, interviews, and videos as learning objects. Although these learning objects constitute a public archive, they also mark events of personal and collaborative significance in the private and professional lives of the GD collective, whose members played varying roles in producing these instructional materials.

From Photobook to Digital Book: Curating Weimar Germany’s New Visual Literacy Online

This contribution focuses on the digital curation of Weimar Germany’s new visual literacy, using Kurt Tucholsky and John Heartfield’s photobook Deutschland, Deutschland über Alles as a case study to examine in which ways a photobook and accompanying research can be showcased online. Tucholsky and Heartfield’s work is an example of the photobook genre that rose to prominence in the 1920s, also for its potential to serve as an “Übungsatlas” (Walter Benjamin) for the new visual literacy. In curating the photobook online, using the publishing platform Scalar and the media repository Critical Commons, the photobook and the accompanying research not only become easily accessible to fellow researchers, students, and the public, but it also becomes possible to emulate and thus explore Weimar Germany’s new visual literacy online. Curating Tucholsky and Heartfield’s photobook and the related analysis online allows for a reflection on digital curation as scholarship, its use in the classroom, and its implications for the trajectory of photobook research.