The ever changing face of digital curation: introduction to the special issue on digital curation

Abstract

According to Yakel (2007), ‘‘Digital Curation is the active involvement of information professionals in the management, including the preservation, of digital data for future use’’ (p. 335). The call for papers for this special issue stated, ‘‘digital curation involves the selection, maintenance, dissemination, preservation and adding value to digital assets. Examples of these activities include the development of repositories for digital resources, the creation and/or selection of digital assets; creation and management of metadata; file format identification and management, and provision for dissemination and access to digital assets’’. In creating a special issue, the guest editors posited that digital curation has much relevance to the archival community. Digital curation is a multidisciplinary field, drawing upon the domain knowledge of many disciplines including archival, information, library, and computer science though communication among these disciplines continues to present challenges. The relationship between archival science and digital curation is a bidirectional continuum: on one hand, digital curation employs archival principles and concepts, such as authenticity and integrity, and requires the preservation of an object’s context as well as its content and structure; on the other hand, digital curation has the potential to challenge and expand the boundaries of archival science. Curation of trusted objects is a complicated activity; not only is the complexity of digital objects increasing, but also the contexts of use in which these objects need to be captured, preserved, and re-created continue to evolve. The types of digital assets