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~ making Penn State's digital data and content findable, discoverable, accessible, and usable for teaching, learning, and research ~
Activities in digital curation can also include data management planning. Please consult our Research Data Management Toolkit to learn more about planning, managing, and sharing your research data.
~ taking a lifecycle approach to caring for digital content ~
Curation Lifecycle Model - from the Digital Curation Centre
Simply put, "curation" has the sense of organizing and maintaining - or overseeing - digital materials, not only to ensure their preservation but also to assess their usefulness continually over time. The Curation Lifecycle Model, at left, gives the significant details of curating digital objects, such as creating or receiving them; appraising and selecting; ingesting (into an archival or repository-based system); preserving; and accessing, using, and reusing.
At Penn State University Libraries, digital curation activities encompass the following:
"Digital curation, broadly interpreted, is about maintaining and adding value to a trusted body of digital information for current and future use." -- Digital Curation Centre
~ ideas for extending the relevance of our collections and data sets for use in teaching, research, and learning ~
Just as primary sources from special collections and archives enhance teaching, learning, and research, so do digital collections enrich these activities - and, arguably, often on a larger scale because of the broadened access that digitization can bring about. Broadened access to our collections and archives can also engender diverse usage of them, in terms of frequency of use, types of use, and kinds of users.
Below is a list of sites, featuring either digitized special collections and data sets in digital format, that suggest thematic approaches for integrating these materials in teaching, learning, and research. Among the ways that these sites give guidance to users is to: provide contexts for collection materials; relate them to other collections (housed in libraries, archives, and museums); offer services such as deposit of data (for other users to access and repurpose); and pose questions for researchers to consider as they explore collections. These are arguably activities of digital curation.
The Digital Collections Review Team develops, on an ongoing basis, priority recommendations for materials to be digitized from our collections based on collections strength. In addition, DCRT confers with subject specialists and other librarians on the needs of the Penn State user community, and with related project teams to determine these priorities.
DOT coordinates, manages, and executes programs, projects and activities involving on-going digital content production, design, delivery, and management as directed by the E- Content Stewardship Council ECSC. DOT develops processes and best practices which include project planning, setting time lines, and calculating resource projections for all standard digitization projects as well as platform upgrades, testing, analysis, and quality management. DOT ensures ongoing communication with stakeholders, including project sponsors, department heads, project leaders and the ECSC. DOT creates, reviews and provides technical, cataloging and preservation assessments for proposed projects, coordinating with the The Digital Collections Review Team DCRT and project stakeholders.
The primary purpose of the ECSC is to develop/review strategies and outline primary tactics for the ongoing implementation of the e-Content Stewardship Program, ensuring effective integration of these activities with all relevant aspects of the Libraries. This includes responsibilities for development of appropriate policies and practices for the effective creation, management, delivery and preservation of digitized and born-digital content that is managed by the Penn State University Libraries and Digital Libraries Technologies.
Advises on and/or assists in the creation, management, access to or disposition of digital data sets needed for research and teaching at Penn State. Initial focus on outreach around the NSF Data Management policy, but this team could help to develop or outline front-line consulting base for advanced research services in a variety of fields and interdisciplinary research.
