Purpose This article discusses the role of the digital curator in cultural heritage, highlighting trends in training programs and best practices of museums in the digital age. It emphasizes the potential of geolocation in a Web Geographic Information System (Web-GIS) environment to enhance the accessibility and preservation of digitized museums. The analysis, conducted as part of the “DCbox – Digital Curator Mapping and Design” project, emphasizes the need for professionals specializing in digital cultural heritage and redefines the digital curator as a mediator between culture, technology and global audiences. Design/methodology/approach The study explores the evolution of the curator’s role since 2000, examining opportunities and challenges of digital humanities and analyzing EU-funded projects and emerging trends. It focuses on the incorporation of digital technologies by museums through geolocated analysis, proposing a customized educational program for training professional digital curators. The conclusions and recommendations of the report are based on a thorough analysis of national situations and case studies from neighboring countries. Findings The analysis of training programs and museum best practices led to the proposal of a customized educational program aimed at training professional digital curators. This program considers various multidisciplinary areas, blending specific topics and subjects to achieve a unique set of functional skills, encompassing both theoretical and practical aspects. Originality/value The innovative aspect of this paper is the approach to geolocating digitized museums through a Web-based GIS, providing detailed informational profiles of various offerings, including augmented, virtual, mixed reality and virtual tours.

The digitization of cultural heritage has reshaped curatorial practice but far too much discussion about digital curation focuses on novelty for its own sake, rather than its critical capacity. This paper places digital curation in the context of critical practice and discusses how ‘virtual exhibition spaces’ challenge and reframe dominant art historical narratives. Building on these, we consider how key virtual exhibitions—Unframed: Black Women Artists and the Archive, Digital Revolution: Art in the Age of Algorithms, and Decolonizing the Virtual: Indigenous Art and Digital Sovereignty—have utilized curatorial strategy to destabilize conventional hierarchies, foreground minority voices, and reimagine art historical inquiry. Methodologically, the study combines critical curatorial studies approach with digital humanities approaches and applies qualitative content analysis to exhibition architectures and visitors’ engagement data capturing in order to disentangle the dynamic relationship between curation practices and reception by audiences. The results show that virtual spaces allow for three critical interventions: 1) the de-centering of Western-centric art historical canons, 2) the activation of participatory narratives that complicate curatorial and spectatorial roles, and 3) non-linear temporalities which disrupt teleological art historical narratives. It is through such interventions, we suggest, that digital curation can be seen to emerge as an urgent site for rethinking the grounds of art history as a practice. The paper, however, also adds a warning about technological determinism and alerts to the fact that the transformative potential of digital curation s dependent on curatorial work practices and not solely affordances of technology. This study is a response to the ongoing debates about the nature of art history in digital age by providing an "operationalist" model to conceptualize digital curation not as add-on but 'a social and cultural practice that radically transforms sites, spaces, disciplinary protocol, and epistemologies.

Developmental and anatomical ontologies are fundamental tools for standardizing biological data. They facilitate the reproducibility of experiments and the integration of information across laboratories and animal species. They underpin digital curation, dissemination and analysis of diverse biological data, including gene expression patterns and phenotypes associated with pharmacological, molecular and genetic perturbations. As such, ontologies are cornerstones of model organism knowledgebases. Echinoderms have been prominent developmental biology models for more than a century and are widely used to address evolutionary questions; however, no formalized ontology has been produced for any echinoderm. Here, based on direct observations of living embryos of five species, representing euechinoids, cidaroids and sea stars, we provide developmental and anatomical ontologies for the embryogenesis of indirect-developing echinoderms. Moreover, we leverage these ontologies to create a 'pan-echinoderm' developmental and anatomical ontology, which we show will support comparative analyses across the phylum. These resources will be important for the curation of data from multiple species by Echinobase and Marimba, two public knowledgebases of echinoderm genomics and invertebrate marine models, respectively. They will greatly enhance the use and value of echinoderms as model organisms for biological research.

Digital curation of formalin-preserved heart specimens via 3D photometric scanning: A report on recent archiving techniques and optimizations.

The development of digital technology has significantly transformed music consumption and marketing strategies in the creative industry. The shift from physical media to digital platforms, especially short-form video-based social media like TikTok, has created a new ecosystem that emphasizes interactivity, community participation, and organic music distribution. TikTok allows users to incorporate song snippets into creative content, positioning music as both entertainment and a symbol of digital identity. This shift reveals that music popularity is now primarily driven by recommendation algorithms and user-generated content rather than traditional promotion. This study adopts a qualitative descriptive approach with phenomenological analysis to explore the relationship between music consumption behavior and marketing strategies on TikTok. Findings indicate that algorithms act as digital curators, influencing audience preferences, while user participation accelerates the viral spread of songs through challenges, remixes, and content reproduction. Effective music marketing strategies must be data-driven, trend-responsive, and capable of leveraging users' emotional and social engagement. TikTok thus serves not only as a distribution platform but also as a space for constructing global popular culture. This study contributes to digital media scholarship and offers practical implications for designing sustainable marketing strategies in the ever-evolving digital ecosystem.

Abstract Digital collecting and conservation today draw from disparate lineages of scholarship and museological practices. Digital design in the United States’ national collection at Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum draws on three lineages: graphic design, interaction design, and installation/performance, which lead to distinct strategies for digital curation and conservation. Early collecting of digital graphic identities, typefaces, and posters was situated in the practices of graphic design scholarship and archiving, centered on renders and outputs of digital design processes. By contrast, interaction design represented through electronic interfaces followed from the collecting and privileging of hardware. A third lineage for digital curation comes from an understanding of interactions as performative, surfacing as installations with multiple audience members at larger scales. Cooper Hewitt’s 2021 acquisition of a live, interactive mapping website, Watercolor Maps by Stamen Design, provides a case study of the integration of these three lineages in the work’s acquisition, conservation, and display as an immersive interactive installation in the 2024 exhibition Acquired!

Abstract As digital ecosystems grow increasingly complex, the ability to critically ignore distractions has emerged as a vital skill for navigating low-quality, false, or malicious information. Coined by Wineburg (2021), Critical Ignoring refers to cognitive/behavioral strategies that enable users to filter irrelevant content, focusing on reliable information. This study investigates how these strategies manifest within the Digital Curation of STEM topics on Wikimedia platforms, and how they are sustained and adapted over time. Through qualitative analysis, findings reaffirm relevance of the three original strategies, self-nudging, lateral reading, and “don’t feed the trolls”, while identifying two additional dimensions, motivational and contextual, shaping how the original strategies operate in collaborative contexts long-term. Motivational strategies (following passions, leveraging expertise, practicing patience) were found to reduce cognitive strain and support sustained engagement. The contextual community layer, reinforced individual efforts through collaboration, validation and shared accountability, amplifying the effectiveness of cognitive/behavioral practices. Findings culminate by introducing an enhanced framework for Critical Ignoring in Digital Curation that integrates cognitive/behavioral, motivational and contextual dimensions. This expanded perspective underscores the importance of incorporating these strategies into Digital Literacy education, equipping learners with tools to navigate algorithm-driven information environments. Furthermore, as Generative AI (GenAI) technologies reshape digital ecosystems, this framework offers a timely model for navigating a changing digital landscape. Addressing gaps in existing literature, this research extends the theoretical and practical understanding of Critical Ignoring, positioning it as a sustained practice, rather than a momentary evaluative skill, and offering actionable strategies for fostering informed, adaptable and resilient digital citizens.

Research data management (RDM) has emerged as a significant and evolving field in Information Science and Knowledge Management, supported by several theoretical models guiding its practice in data-intensive institutions such as universities, libraries, data hubs and research centres. This article, drawn from a larger study on RDM in selected South African public universities, proposes a framework to address the absence of a nationally accepted model. The post-positivist research paradigm was used in the study, employing both qualitative and quantitative methodologies. Semi-structured interviews with 23 study participants were conducted online via Microsoft Teams to collect qualitative data. The questionnaires were converted into Google Forms and emailed to 30 researchers rated by the National Research Foundation to collect the quantitative data. Although existing frameworks such as the community capability model framework, data audit framework, collaborative assessment of research data infrastructure and objectives model, and the Digital Curation Centre lifecycle model are largely applied in developed contexts, this study highlights the need for a locally relevant framework. The proposed model emphasises collaboration among universities and key stakeholders, policy development, and the possible setting up of a centralised national research database. The framework is expected to inform RDM practice in South Africa and provide insights for comparative studies internationally.

This qualitative article explores digital pedagogies methods for learning information retrieval (IR) content modules in South African Library and Information Science (LIS) higher education institutions (HEIs). The study seeks to establish the content of IR modules, and the digital pedagogies methods used for learning IR content modules in South African LIS HEIs offering LIS education. The population of this study includes the LIS students learning IR content modules. The researcher used document reviews for the IR content module descriptors and assessment plans, and focus-group discussions with the LIS students as data-collection instruments. The collected data were analysed using document analysis and thematic analyses. This study revealed that the content of IR modules comprises information literacy; information sources and resources; authority control; cataloguing; metadata; classification; subject headings; abstracting and indexing; information searching/seeking and retrieval; bibliographic control; information organisation; alerting services; designing personal websites, blogs, wikis and personal databases; scholarly communication; digital scholarship; digital curation; applications of digital technologies; principles, standards, frameworks and models for resource description and discoverability; vocabulary control; and thesaurus. This study further established that the digital pedagogies used for learning IR content modules involves the learning management system known as Moodle, and the online platforms such as Microsoft Teams and Telegram. This article recommends that the South African LIS HEIs teach and learn a standardised and digitally transformed content of the IR modules and adapt with the new teaching and learning methods of digital pedagogies.

Abstract Established in 1818, the National Museum [Museu Nacional, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro (MN)] is the oldest scientific institution in Brazil and one of the most significant repositories of Natural History Collections in the Global South. This article provides an updated overview of the current status of Natural History Collections in the MN (organized into five major areas: Entomology, Invertebrates, Vertebrates, Botany, and Palaeontology) in the aftermath of the devastating 2018 fire that affected drastically the MN palace, herein called Paço de São Cristovão. We highlight important post-disaster actions, such as the rescue of items within the Paço de São Cristovão, staff rearrangements, collection donations, and the publishing of the Collection Management Policy of Museu Nacional. In 2024, six years after the disaster, the MN opened new modular buildings with laboratories, working cabinets, and collection storage facilities, in a new campus (Campus de Pesquisa e Ensino do Museu Nacional/UFRJ). We also discuss recent advances in digitization efforts, which include photographs, particularly concerning historical and type specimens, implementation of an institutional collection management program, and the establishment of the Laboratory of Digital Collections, Museu Nacional (COLDIGI/MN), a hub for digital infrastructure development and planning. These initiatives reaffirm the commitment by MN to best practices in both physical and digital curation, aimed at enhancing research, preservation, and public access to its collections. The trajectory of the Museum demonstrates that resilience, combined with knowledge, skills, and shared dedication, can transform tragedy into a powerful opportunity for institutional strengthening and global scientific leadership.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is reshaping library and information science (LIS) education, transforming curricula, research practices, and professional roles. Traditionally centred on cataloguing, classification, and reference services, LIS education must now integrate competencies in digital curation, machine learning, data analytics, and intelligent information systems. AI-driven tools, including automated cataloguing platforms, adaptive learning environments, and plagiarism detection software, enhance efficiency, support personalised learning, and expand research capacities. Nevertheless, these innovations also present challenges such as inadequate infrastructure, limited funding, algorithmic bias, and privacy concerns, which risk deepening inequalities between well-resourced and under-resourced institutions. The redefined role of librarians in the AI era demands both technological proficiency and a commitment to enduring professional values such as equity, intellectual freedom, and social justice. This paper explores the opportunities and challenges posed by AI in LIS education and argues that the sustainability of the profession depends on its ability to adapt strategically. The central question remains: will LIS education embrace AI as a catalyst for reinvention, or risk marginalisation in the evolving digital landscape?

The purpose of this article is to comprehensively analyse the dynamics of digital initiatives in US academic libraries in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Research methodology. The article uses historical and chronological analysis (to identify the stages of development of digital initiatives), as well as content analysis of scientific publications, reports of professional associations (e.g., Digital Library Federation, ASIS&T) and job advertisements. The latter method enables the tracking of demand dynamics for new professional competencies and changes in the professional profile of librarians. Scientific novelty. The scientific novelty of the study lies in its being one of the first in Ukrainian academic discourse to specifically and systematically investigate the dynamics of digital initiatives in US academic libraries, rather than focusing on individual aspects of their digitisation. Conclusions. It has been proven that at the end of the 20th and beginning of the 21st centuries, academic libraries in the United States underwent a significant transformation that changed their paradigm and identity: from curators of physical artefacts, they became active participants in the digital environment and hubs of technological services. This dynamic was accompanied by the differentiation of professional roles (digital initiatives librarian, digital curator, digital research librarian, etc.) and institutional consolidation through the creation of professional communities. The article traces the transformation from isolated technological projects (electronic catalogues, digitisation) to integrated programmes covering institutional repositories, data management, digital humanities and open access. Despite significant successes, the industry continues to face key challenges, including the need to bridge the gap between the technological requirements of practice and library education, as well as ensuring the long-term preservation of digital content and the sustainability of digital projects. The experience of the United States is critical to the development of strategies for academic libraries in the context of global digital transformation.

This study investigates how adult readers in Russia engage with self-help books within a dynamic therapeutic market, focusing on how they interpret imperatives, construct genre boundaries, and enact agency amid neoliberal discourses and evolving mental health infrastructures. Drawing on 15 qualitative interviews with self-selected participants from digital psychological communities, the study details how readers negotiate between imported and domestic texts, dynamically evaluate author credibility, and calibrate book selection through both digital and social networks. It analyzes the gendered landscape of readership, revealing patterns shaped by social positioning and access constraints. Findings highlight that readers actively curate and adapt practices—such as selective reading, annotation, sharing, and digital curation—to manage cognitive and emotional labor, respond to cultural resonance, and critically engage with prescriptive advice. Barriers including market saturation, cultural mismatch, and linguistic disconnect foster strategic resistance and critical boundary-setting, positioning readers as active cultural intermediaries. By foregrounding the creative, emotional, and critical work of Russian self-help readers, the study contributes to the cultural sociology of reading, demonstrating how agency, meaning-making, and genre legitimation are collaboratively produced at the intersection of market logics, digital infrastructures, and individual subjectivities.

This study investigates how digital storytelling (DS) functions as a communicative strategy for the online presentation of local heritage. It aims to understand the extent to which DS mitigates digital disruption and supports inclusive, participatory, and identity-based narratives. The research applies a qualitative discourse analysis, complemented by a quantitative scope analysis, to a selected sample of 57 websites containing local heritage content. The analytical framework is organized into four levels of discourse analysis: textual, contextual, interactional/action-based, and ideological. The websites were evaluated according to narrative structure, emotional tone, multimodality, user interaction and curatorial authority. DS was identified in 60% of the websites in implicit, explicit or combined form. These DS strategies frequently include multimodal formats (text, audio, video, and image), personalized expression and emotionally resonant language. A recurring paradox was observed: while visual design is becoming more minimalistic, narrative richness is increasing. Most websites exhibited integrative and micro-historical approaches; however, a subset retained institutional or canon-based frameworks that limit narrative diversity. Methodologically, the study underscores the need to adapt discourse analysis to multimodal and non-linear environments. It also highlights the significance of curatorial power in shaping digital heritage narratives. The findings are relevant to libraries, cultural institutions and digital curators seeking to enhance user engagement and inclusivity through narrative strategies. This research contributes to digital heritage, information science and internet studies by considering DS as a form of socio-technical resilience that supports meaning-making, identity and cultural memory in digitally mediated environments.

The introduction of artificial intelligence (AI) to art galleries is transforming the visitor-artwork interaction and establishing new adaptive and personalized experiences that are more context-relevant. This paper will discuss the concept of adaptive interface design and deployment within AI-assisted art spaces, and how dynamic systems can adapt the exhibition content to both a specific user profile, behavior, and emotional reaction. In an in-depth analysis of the literature on interactive technologies in museums, user experience design, and machine learning-based personalization, the research paper reveals current gaps in visitor interaction and the flexibility of the interface. The data are gathered using a mixed-method research design by using user observation, interviews, and analytics to comprehend the interaction patterns and the cognitive response to adaptive systems. The suggested system architecture is based on user profiling, behavior tracking, and real-time content adjustment algorithms that are implemented with the use of AI frameworks like TensorFlow and OpenCV. The examples of AI-boosted galleries that already exist and a prototype of an application at a local exhibition show that adaptive interfaces could have a significant potential to engage viewers further and lead to meaningful interactions with art. Measures of evaluation such as dwell time, emotional resonance and interaction diversity demonstrate a significant increase in user satisfaction and learning retention. The results point to the importance of AI-based adaptive interface as an intelligent mediator of art and audience, which can be scaled down to future digital curation activities and can contribute to inclusivity and accessibility in contemporary art environments.

This case study focuses on the role of curatorial agency in the migration of the University of Toledo Digital Repository (UTDR). Institutional repository (IR) migrations are necessary preservation actions intended to ensure long-term access to digital content. Disruptions resulting from iterative migrations may diminish user trust in IR services and present other risks. Curatorial agency refers to the responsibility and authority of curators mediating between digital media and audiences and can mitigate some unforeseen or unavoidable effects of data migrations. Curatorial agency is established through connections and negotiations within heterogeneous actor-networks, which result in transformational processes, such as those associated with data migrations. Therefore, this case study takes a sociotechnical approach needed for an analytical framework, which merges elements of the actor-network theory with those of the Digital Curation Centre’s (DCC) curation lifecycle model and a Levels of Representation in Digital Collections framework based on Lee’s model. It focuses on the vital role of curatorial agency in UTDR migrations. Using a detailed account of the repository migration and framework analysis, this case study offers significant insight into the role of curatorial agency in managing migrations and establishing new curation strategies, including virtual exhibitions. Key findings include increased transparency of transformational processes in the UTDR migrations and in the role of curatorial agency in the preservation framework.

The rise of digital museums, especially those leveraging emerging technologies like blockchain, has transformed the way art is curated, accessed, and commercialized. However, this shift poses complex challenges for Native-centric art fairs. Native-centric artistic expression is deeply rooted in spiritual, communal, and cultural traditions and has provided platforms for showcasing authentic artworks. The problem lies in the potential erosion of Indigenous values in an ethical, digitized, or commodified environment. This study addresses the technological advancements in digital curation, but there exists a gap in understanding how digital museums affect Indigenous art, communities, particularly from a religious and bioethical standpoint. The objective of this research is to critically analyze the ethical and religious implications of integrating Native-centric art into digital museums, focusing on how these platforms align or conflict with Indigenous value systems. A philosophical method of analysis is adopted in this study to critically review digital museum infrastructures and their ethical protocols. The research findings reveal a significant dissonance between the individualistic, ownership-based logic of digital museums and the collective, sacred nature of many Native art forms. The contributions of this study lie in foregrounding Indigenous epistemologies in digital ethics discourse and introducing a framework that integrates religious values and bioethical considerations into digital curation practices. Recommendations include adopting community-driven consent mechanisms, ensuring digital sovereignty for Indigenous data, and establishing intercultural ethical guidelines for the digitization of sacred, cultural heritage and ethical collaboration between Indigenous communities, technologists to build inclusive and respectful digital futures.

This study examines how digital curation, in museum contexts, extends andsustains audience participation, and how it fosters “loose solidarity” throughoutthat process. Drawing on Granovetter’s theory of weak ties and Castells’s network society, loose solidarity is defined as an affective bond that accrues through repeated contact, lightweight interactions, and processes of shared narration and recognition, without presupposing strong membership or formal institutional participation. Methodologically, the study adopts a comparative case approach, analyzing four projects: the Getty Museum Challenge, Tate Collective, Smithsonian DigitalVolunteers, and Rhizome ArtBase. Findings indicate that the Getty MuseumChallenge and Tate Collective achieved participation at scale by mobilizingopen‑image resources, open calls, and social‑media-based curatorial devices, whereas Smithsonian Digital Volunteers and Rhizome secured the durability of participation through archival platforms and digital tooling. Despite differences in media and aims, all four cases deepen ties via a common mechanism: low barriers to entry; recognition/feedback loops; visibility and tool provision; and the codification of operating rules. The study concludes that digital curation functions not merely as technological adoption but as a relational practice and a public organizational strategy, reconfiguring the museum as a networked cultural commons. In doing so, it establishes digital curation as an operating principle that integrates both scalability and durability.

This paper addresses the challenging task of automatic scene classification in art films, a genre characterized by symbolic visuals, asynchronous audio, and non-linear storytelling. We propose Styloformer, a multimodal transformer architecture designed to integrate visual, auditory, textual, and curatorial signals into a unified representation space. The model combines cross-modal attention, stylistic clustering, influence prediction, and canonicality estimation to handle the semantic and historical complexity of art cinema. Additionally, we introduce a novel module called Historiographic Navigation, which embeds ontological priors and temporal logic to support interpretive reasoning. Evaluated on multiple benchmarks, Styloformer achieves state-of-the-art performance, including 91.85% accuracy and 94.31% AUC on the MovieNet dataset—outperforming baselines such as CLIP and ViT. Ablation studies further demonstrate the importance of each architectural component. Unlike general-purpose video models, our system is tailored to the aesthetic and narrative structure of art films, making it suitable for applications in digital curation and computational film analysis. Styloformer represents a scalable and interpretable approach to understanding artistic media, bridging machine learning with art historical reasoning.

Based on the critical underrepresentation of regional food heritage in conventional museum practices, this study proposes the design and theoretical underpinnings of the Guangxi Rice Noodles Museum, a hybrid digital-physical exhibition. The project aims to preserve and communicate the cultural significance of Guangxi rice noodles as both tangible and intangible heritage, fostering intergenerational transmission and critical reflection on its commercial value. Drawing on participatory museology and sensory studies, the methodology integrates immersive technologies—including markerless AR, VR cooking simulations, multilingual voice interaction, and motion-triggered scent devices—with community-driven content collection and inclusive design principles. The research results in a detailed, implementable framework comprising a structured content data model, user journey mapping, and functional specifications for interactive systems. It is concluded that this multisensory and participatory approach effectively transforms everyday food culture into an engaging heritage experience, bridging the gap between local knowledge and global audiences. The museum model demonstrates how digital curation can serve as a platform for cultural democratization, inclusivity, and sustainable heritage practice, positioning regional culinary traditions within broader discourses of identity and memory.