Developing Digital Curation Policies in a Local Context

As the sheer volume and complexity of digital objects expands, content creators and data managers have come to see the need for governing policies that encompass more than just archiving and preservation issues. The concept of “digital curation” encompasses both archiving and preservation but stresses a holistic lifecycle management approach to creating, selecting and maintaining digital objects and metadata. Several research projects have determined that curation awareness is strongest in the data-intense hard sciences such as physics and engineering but is gaining foothold in the humanities disciplines and information repositories. This presentation will explore the broad principles of digital curation and examine its implementation through institutional case studies of libraries and archives. Finally, the presentation will open up some questions about the challenges of developing and implementing local digital curation policies.