Closing the Digital Curation Gap (CDCG)

An international collaboration to integrate best practice, research & development, and training in digital curation.

Many information practitioners, regardless of job title, are conducting digital curation activities now in a wide range of repositories and institutions. Examples of these activities include:

• creation of high-quality digital surrogates and originals selection and acquisition of existing digital assets
• creation of metadata for discovery, management, interoperability and preservation
• managing intellectual property
• managing other rights to access and use
• digital collections file format identification and management
• managing archival storage environments migration of content over time.

Often these are new tasks and processes for which institutions and current staff members have little training or experience. There is a need to identify specific tasks and develop clear and understandable guides to good practice for information professionals working in libraries, archives, museums and other information centres and repositories.

This project proposed to create such guides along with other tools to support the cultural heritage repository community, and especially staff in small- to medium-sized institutions in the US and UK, through researched, realistic, practical, and accessible guidance and advice.

The Closing the Digital Curation Gap (CDCG) collaboration served as a locus of interaction between those doing leading edge digital curation research, development, teaching, and training.

This occured in academic and practitioner communities with a professional interest in applying viable innovations within particular organizational contexts: - IMLS - JISC - the DCC, charged with disseminating such innovation and best practices - the SCA, charged to build a common information environment where users of publicly funded e-Content can realize best value by reducing the barriers that inhibit access, use and re-use of online content.

Funding Body: 

IMLS

JISC

Partners: 

School of Information and Library Science (SILS) at the University of North Carolina (UNC)

Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC)

Strategic Content Alliance (SCA)

HATII/Digital Curation Center (DCC)

Start date: 

10/2009

End date: 

09/2011

Outputs: 

• Establish and support a network of digital curation practitioners, researchers, and educators through face-to-face meetings, web-based communication, and various other information and communication technology (ICT) tools;
• Establish a baseline of digital curation practice/knowledge, especially in small to medium-sized cultural heritage institutions in the US and UK, through surveys, interviews and case studies;
• Develop a schema for ongoing development of digital curation frameworks, guidance, and best practices, as well as the roles various organisations (IMLS; JISC; DCC; SCA; academia; and professional organizations) can play;
• Produce selected tools for the target communities such as guides to good practice, decision trees, and Digital Reference Manual chapters; Plan for future collaborative projects based on what we learn from this initial endeavour;
• Lay a foundation that will inform future training, education, and practice