Digital Curation Fundamentals

Websites and digital news stories disappear daily; researchers can’t access their own data for reuse; students don’t know how to make their work last for the next 10 years. Knowledge is built on previously gathered information, but what happens when that information is no longer accessible? And where does the librarian or archivist fit into this picture? This book describes the basic steps of data curation, in clear easy-to-follow language, and clarifies the many potential roles that a librarian or archivist can play to help make our information future viable for generations to come.

Digital Curation Fundamentals is for anyone who wants to help save knowledge for future use, but knows little-to-nothing about digital curation or how it fits with their jobs. This book is also for administrators who need to stay on top of things but don’t yet have a good grasp on the purpose and scope of digital curation and how central it is to the future. Additionally, this book is a reference handbook for those who are involved in digital curation in some form but who need the context to know how their work fits into the big picture, and what comes next. This book takes a straight-forward, commonsense approach to a complex problem, and portrays the challenges and opportunities in an approachable conversational style which lowers the bar to include those with little to no technical expertise.

Jody L. DeRidder is the Director of Metadata Frameworks in the Metadata Strategy and Operations Division of OCLC, Inc., where she is facilitating the development of methods to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of managing various kinds of metadata and information. During the prior 9 years, she was Head of Metadata and Digital Services at the University of Alabama, where she developed practical policies, procedures, and infrastructure for digital preservation, digitization, metadata workflows, and web delivery. There she developed a tiered and targeted approach to digital preservation for constantly expanding holdings, focusing on practical solutions. In 2011 she was one of the first contingent of invited participants in the Digital Preservation and Outreach Train-the-Trainer program, and the webinars she subsequently provided through the Association of Southeastern Research Libraries broke all records for attendance and continue to enjoy hundreds of downloads monthly. In 2014 she was honored to be a keynote speaker for the Best Practices Exchange Conference, which focuses on digital preservation. She both writes and presents about preservation and digital libraries in both the library and archival fields. With a master’s in computer science as well as one in information sciences, she combines technical expertise with theoretical knowledge to master the difficult aspects of digital curation and communicate this knowledge effectively to a broad audience.