The Zombie Stack Exchanges That Just Won't Die
In the United States use of the term "digital preservation" seems dominant, while "digital curation" seems to be dominant in the United Kingdom. Do these terms entail fundamentally different activities?
Thomas Padilla
"Digital curation" is a term which reflects a holistic approach for managing digital assets and includes activities that span the "lifecycle" of a digital object: selection, collection, preservation, maintenance, access, long term archiving, and stewarding digital assets over time. The holistic approach to managing digital assets can be seen as a "value chain" in which the individual activities performed under the banner of digital curation each improve and synergistically produce gains in value of the digital assets and collections.
"Digital preservation" is a specific activity within the digital curation lifecycle which is concerned with the long term management and maintenance of digital assets. Digital preservation can be broken down into risks associated with: disk level preservation risks, bit level preservation risks, and function level preservation risks.
Major disk level preservation risks include hardware failure, disk array redundancy (e.g. RAID), backup scheduling, permissions, geographic distribution, network bottlenecks and other hardware & network associated challenges.
Major bit level preservation risks include bit rot, bit flipping, fixity-checking, content fidelity, file formats, virus-checking, among other file and bit level challenges.
Major functional level preservation risks include file and software obsolescence, format migration, reformatting & refreshing content, and other challenges associated with preserving the original utility and use of the digital assets.
The trick here is that digital curation has also become a term for creating a feed of digital content. See the curator's code, and any number things about tumbler as curation, about pintrest as curation, and about the general idea of curatorial media.
One of the risks with using the term digital curation is that it is rapidly becoming a term that means very little. If you say preservation people get that you are talking about the long haul, if you say digital curation I think folks are likely going to think of brain pickings.
The other term I would throw in the mix that has seen some traction is "digital stewardship." One of my colleagues wrote a nice post working through issues with each of these terms. I tend to like "stewardship" over "curation" as stewardship carries with it a mixture of care about the present and care about the future.
I think the key thing here is that these terms mean different things to different people and it is important to think about who you are talking to.
The terminology is slippery, as we all admit, but another problem is that "curation" has a specific, pre-existing meaning in the museum (and larger cultural heritage) context -- one which has little to nothing to do with long-term preservation. That, to me, is largely why its appropriation is problematic. In most organizations, conservators not curators are responsible for the ongoing preservation of artifacts.
In the digital realm, conservation & preservation have become interchangeable. But curators, traditionally, are responsible for selection, arrangement, interpretation, exhibition, blahblahblah, but not conservation. So to use the term "curation" as though it implies preservation is misleading or at least an alteration of meaning no different than those that use it to mean aggregating cool links.