Digital Curation: A How‐To‐Do‐It Manual

Citation

Donnelly, M. (2011), "Digital Curation: A How‐To‐Do‐It Manual", Library Review, Vol. 60 No. 4, pp. 345-347. https://doi.org/10.1108/00242531111127893

Digital curation is a field about which a wealth of high‐quality information is available on the web. It is also a field that changes rapidly and has few common understandings so far. These factors make it very important to keep up‐to‐date. Online materials may be the best source of information [.] – Harvey, p. 93.

This book arrives at an interesting time. Not so long ago it was possible for a single researcher to be on nodding terms at least with the entirety of the (formal and grey) literature on digital curation. There is now too much of it, appearing in increasing volume at great rapidity, and we are obliged to appraise and specialise.

In his preface, Ross Harvey claims that this book “makes a significant contribution by describing in detail, in one place, the basics and current practices of digital curation”. In essence what Harvey has done is sewn together a collection of resources created by an international selection of expert third parties, such as the Digital Curation Centre (at which Harvey was a Visiting Research Fellow in 2007) and the US National Space Agency's OAIS Reference Model for an Open Archival Information System, and hung this over the skeleton (or “action‐oriented structure”) of the DCC Curation Lifecycle Model, with his own commentary as the glue that holds it together. By taking this approach, Harvey himself becomes a kind of curator‐gatherer of content, a knowledgeable expert guide drawing on – and drawing attention to – paradigmatic resources from around the world.

The way in which the book is arranged is solid, linear and programmatic. It is part primer, part bibliography; indeed, some sections comprise solely of lengthy lists of tools and resources with short descriptions of what they do and their URLs. The book's accompanying web site (www.neal‐schuman.com/curation/) offers a further wealth of hyperlinks, which are obviously more readily updatable than the book itself (and given the pace with which the topic changes, it would be interesting to know how this site is itself being curated: some of the resources to which it currently points have already been superseded; a risk that ineluctably accompanies this mosaic‐like approach).

The first 50 or so pages are a little repetitive, but this allows readers to dip in and out on a modular basis, which in fairness is probably the way that this book is expected to be used, as opposed to reading it straight through from start to finish. Thankfully the content is lucid, and Harvey does a good job of explaining the major concepts in a digestible way with a minimum of off‐putting jargon. He is scrupulous in differentiating between related terms and concepts such as archiving, preservation, curation, management and stewardship (pp. 7‐8). Having said that, some sections could also be repurposed as useful primers on digital preservation, pointing as they do to more detailed treatments than are feasible in a book of this type.

Perhaps, unsurprisingly, given the extent to which the content relies upon DCC resources (in the interests of disclosure, my own work is cited in roughly a third of the chapters) there was little here that I disagreed with to any significant extent. The section on Curation and Curators (p. 60) has a positive emphasis on the importance of disciplinary approaches to curation, perhaps as a result of the book's reliance on OAIS/designated communities, although it does give rise to a fear that focusing exclusively on a designated community at the appraisal stage may lead to disposal of materials that could be useful to other communities (p. 147); that said, this is fundamentally an interdisciplinary communication issue.

The Legal Issues section is somewhat slight, and the discussion of copyrighting data (p. 207), admittedly a bit of a grey area, does not tally precisely with my own understanding of the UK situation. I would also like to have seen more on citizen science and reliability/trust/provenance, and here it should be noted that the book suffers from an almost exclusive focus on academic curation: there is scant treatment of business or government data. The text does include some good, arresting and occasionally provocative quotes from third party blog posts; more of these would have been very welcome.

Finally, the lack of a dedicated Conclusion is a pity: the book ends quite abruptly, with a cursory concluding paragraph tacked on to the last of the Lifecycle actions, and one is left with the feeling that this was a missed opportunity for Harvey to bring his own voice to the foreground with a discussion of likely future developments. However, these few minor niggles need not detract from the fact that this is a welcome, timely and useful collection of resources, opinions and accepted best practice, assiduously gathered, soundly organised, and elegantly stitched together.