Placing the Horse before the Cart: Conceptual and Technical Dimensions of Digital Curation

»Spannt das Pferd vor den Wagen! Konzeptuelle und technische Dimensionen Digitaler Bestandspflege«. Digital curation has to come from a conceptual starting point, like any other research or educational program. The balance between the practical and the theoretical components can be discussed: As Digital Humanities – and Digital Curation as part of it – stand at a nexus between traditional Humanities and Social Sciences, this balance may be less obvious, a position at that nexus is particularly rewarding however. The need for developments within Computer Science has to be determined by the joined conceptual mandate, however. To provide for an understanding of this conceptual mandate, we describe the development of digital curation. As a term it can be traced back to the early nineties, as a extremely vivid research agenda, with many international links, it has created a plethora of projects, conferences and publications since the early years of this century

Placing the horse before the cart: conceptual and technical dimensions of digital curation

"Digital curation has to come from a conceptual starting point, like any other research or educational program. The balance between the practical and the theoretical components can be discussed: As Digital Humanities - and Digital Curation as part of it - stand at a nexus between traditional Humanities and Social Sciences, this balance may be less obvious, a position at that nexus is particularly rewarding however. The need for developments within Computer Science has to be determined by the joined conceptual mandate, however. To provide for an understanding of this conceptual mandate, we describe the development of digital curation. As a term it can be traced back to the early nineties, as an extremely vivid research agenda, with many international links, it has created a plethora of projects, conferences and publications since the early years of this century." (author's abstract

Digital Curation Education and Training: From Digitization to Graduate Curricula to MOOCs

This paper traces the development of digital and data curation curricula. Due to the brief length of this paper, the focus is on North American initiatives and primarily on continuing education programs. It explores the strengths and weaknesses of professional workshops and the creation of graduate-level courses, certificates, degrees and MOOCs, as well as the role of funding agencies in this process. It concludes with an analysis of what is missing and what is needed to create the workforce required to steward digital assets in the foreseeable future

Feasibility and marketing studies of health sciences librarianship education programs.

The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill evaluated five curricular models designed to improve education for health sciences librarianship. Three of the models enhanced existing degree and certificate programs, and two were new programs for working information professionals. Models were developed with input from experts and a Delphi study; the marketability of the models was tested through surveys of potential students and employers; and recommendations were made as a guide to implementation. The results demonstrated a demand for more specialized curricula and for retraining opportunities. Marketing data showed a strong interest from potential students in a specialized master's degree, and mid-career professionals indicated an interest in post-master's programs that provided the ability to maintain employment. The study pointed to the opportunity for a center of excellence in health sciences information education to enable health sciences librarians to respond to their evolving roles

Modeling the Information-Seeking Behavior of Social Scientists: Ellis's Study Revisited

This paper revises David Ellis's information-seeking behavior model of social scientists, which includes six generic features: starting, chaining, browsing, differentiating, monitoring, and extracting. The paper uses social science faculty researching stateless nations as the study population. The description and analysis of the information-seeking behavior of this group of scholars is based on data collected through structured and semistructured electronic mail interviews. Sixty faculty members from 14 different countries were interviewed by e-mail. For reality check purposes, face-to-face interviews with five faculty members were also conducted. Although the study confirmed Ellis's model, it found that a fuller description of the information-seeking process of social scientists studying stateless nations should include four additional features besides those identified by Ellis. These new features are: accessing, networking, verifying, and information managing. In view of that, the study develops a new model, which, unlike Ellis's, groups all the features into four interrelated stages: searching, accessing, processing, and ending. This new model is fully described and its implications on research and practice are discussed. How and why scholars studied here are different than other academic social scientists is also discussed

Finding Finding Aids on the World Wide Web

Reports results of a study to explore how well six popular Web search engines performed in retrieving specific electronic finding aids mounted on the World Wide Web. A random sample of online finding aids was selected and then searched using AltaVista, Excite, Fast Search, Google, Hotbot and Northern Light, employing both word and phrase searching. As of February 2000, approximately 8 percent of repositories listed at the 'Repositories of Primary Resources' Web site had mounted at least four full finding aids on the Web. The most striking finding of this study was the importance of using phrase searches whenever possible, rather than word searches. Also of significance was the fact that if a finding aid were to be found using any search engine, it was generally found in the first ten or twenty items at most. The study identifies the best performers among the six chosen search engines. Combinations of search engines often produced much better results than did the search engines individually, evidence that there may be little overlap among the top hits provided by individual engines