Functional Frameworks for Socialized Digital Curation: Curatorial Interventions and Curation Spaces in Archives and Libraries

Abstract

Archives and libraries have expanded their curatorial capabilities with digital technologies and social media. Digital repositories, content management systems, and social media are part of a dual strategy for curating digital collections, combining the digital preservation of media and community participation in preserving community memory, cultural heritage, and thematic research collections. Socialized digital curation (SoDC) represents the convergence of digital and social curation approaches in a broader framework of relationships across the curation spaces (or functional frameworks) holding the pieces—curators, communities, collections, and technologies—together. Social purposing is evident as curators develop relationships with diverse communities. The cultural, generational, and professional diversity of archivist, librarian, and participant-curator (ALPC) communities further contributes to diversity in collection themes, choice of technologies, and knowledge organization preferences. The growth of digital content and collaborative activity on the Internet, however, has raised concerns about the discoverability of digital content in a fragmented Internet environment, necessitating three curatorial interventions—interlinking, knowledge organization, and documentation—to join disconnected and uninteroperable fragments. The conceptual framework presented in this study focuses on the interrelationships among curators, collections, technologies, and practices. There are no monolithic solutions to curatorial interventions and approaches to SoDC, as all archives and special collections are unique.

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