Digital Curation in the Digital Humanities: Preserving and Promoting Archival and Special Collections

The convergence of new technologies in digital humanities, and the growing importance of open access in the research arena, means that there is an increasing focus on how archival and special collections are made available digitally, are curated and are preserved. There are increasingly blurred lines between faculty, archives and libraries within the digital humanities.

This book seeks to address the blurred lines. The work looks to, amongst other things, present theoretical and practical perspectives on digital curation, explore the role of social media within digital curation and explore collaboration and organisation structures within digital curation.

The volume is divided into seven chapters or themes. First, it defines digital curation within the digital humanities context, and it then moves on to placing archives and special collections with the digital humanities. Next, it looks at curating digital cultural heritage before going on to the more technical areas of information architecture and the lifecycle of digital curation. The volume concludes by looking at the organisational aspects that impact digital curation and how social media fits within the curation of digital collections.

Each section is well-written, and although not exhaustive in its treatment, gives enough detail and guidance for further research into digital curation. From the point of a practitioner dealing with these issues on a day-to-day basis, I found it useful to refocus my thinking and a reminder of what we are seeking to do with our collections.

Overall, I would recommend this as a useful primer for those who need an entry point to digital curation, either as a practitioner or as a student. I will be keeping it within easy reach for when I need to refresh my thinking about explaining elements of digital curation to the curious.