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U : An Extended Digital Curation Lifecycle Model
| Content Provider | Semantic Scholar |
|---|---|
| Author | Constantopoulos, Panos Dallas, Costis J. Androutsopoulos, Ion Angelis, Stavros Deligiannakis, Antonios Gavrilis, Dimitris Kotidis, Yannis Papatheodorou, Christos |
| Copyright Year | 2008 |
| Abstract | The proliferation of Web, database and social networking technologies has enabled us to produce, publish and exchange digital assets at an enormous rate. This vast amount of information that is either digitized or born-digital needs to be collected, organized and preserved in a way that ensures that our digital assets and the information they carry remain available for future use. Digital curation has emerged as a new inter-disciplinary practice that seeks to set guidelines for disciplined management of information. In this paper we review two recent models for digital curation introduced by the Digital Curation Centre (DCC) of UK and the Digital Curation Unit (DCU) of the Athena Research Centre. We then propose a fusion of the two models that highlights the need to extend the digital curation lifecycle by adding (a) provisions for the registration of usage experience, (b) a stage for knowledge enhancement and (c) controlled vocabularies used by convention to denote concepts, properties and relations. The objective of the proposed extensions is twofold: (i) to provide a more complete lifecycle model for the digital curation domain; and (ii) to provide a stimulus for a broader discussion on the research agenda. Panos Constantopoulos, Ion Androutsopoulos and Yannis Kotidis are also with the Department of Informatics, Athens University of Economics and Business. Costis Dallas is also with the Department of Communication, Media and Culture, Panteion University. Antonios Deligiannakis is also with the Department of Electronic and Computer Engineering, Technical University of Crete. Christos Papatheodorou is also with the Department of Archive and Library Science, Ionian University. 2 DCC&U: An Extended Digital Curation Lifecycle Model The International Journal of Digital Curation Issue x, Volume x | 2xxx. Introduction We live in a world where our personal and collective memory is informed by all kinds of digital information: personal images and videos, work documents, spreadsheets, e-books, emails, blogs, RSS feeds etc. The proliferation of Web and social networking technologies has enabled us to communicate, exchange and produce new digital assets at a phenomenal rate. The same trend is also evident in enterpriseand state-run organisations. The adaptation of database technologies and, more recently, the Web, has led to an increasing volume of digitized or born-digital objects that not only help streamline daily operations and services, but also shape up our sociocultural experience and identity. This deluge of digital information introduces new requirements for the process of appraisal, preservation and management, related to the need to ensure that our digital assets, and the information they carry, remain available for future use. A number of critical questions emerged to this end, as researchers and practitioners became aware of the severity and the universality of the problem, in the context of digital preservation research and practice: How can we ensure the authenticity and integrity of digital objects? What should we preserve, in the face of this digital information deluge, and what not? How are we to ensure usability and accessibility of these evolving information assets, as their context of use changes? Digital curation has emerged as a new interdisciplinary practice, community of practice, and field of inquiry, that seeks to find answers to these questions. Its fundamental principle is that ensuring future fitness for purpose of digital information, as its context of use evolves, requires the active management and appraisal of digital assets over their entire lifecycle. The UK’s Digital Curation Centre (DCC) has been a leading advocate of the need to approach digital information management from a disciplined lifecycle perspective. The DCC curation lifecycle model has appeared in (Higgins, 2007). Issues of authenticity and integrity, strategies to provide for adequate knowledge representation and access, support for a predictable preservation lifecycle of assets, as well as attention to the interests of particular communities of practice – such as archivists and researchers have been major areas of interest for the DCC, in addition to its significant role as a centre for advocacy in learning on digital curation issues, not least on account of its ambitious digital curation manual publishing project. Work in the Digital Curation Unit, Athena Research Centre, Athens, on the other hand, stems from extensive work in cultural heritage informatics, especially in the fields of cultural domain ontologies (Kakali et al. 2007, Stasinopoulou et al. 2007, Constantopoulos et al. 2004, Constantopoulos et al. 2002, Constantopoulos, Dritsou 2007, Bekiari, Constantopoulos, Doerr 2007), of natural language processing (Malakasiotis, P. & Androutsopoulos, I. 2007, Galanis, D. & Androutsopoulos, I. 2007, Androutsopoulos, I. & Galanis, D. 2005, Androutsopoulos, I., Aretoulaki, M. & Mitkov, R. (Ed.) 2003), metadata in the field of digital libraries (Kakali et al. 2007), archives and public sector information (Bountouri et al. 2008) and dynamic management and maintenance of views in databases and data warehouses (Kotidis, Roussopoulos, 2001). A recent analysis of curation practices in the field of museums DCC&U: An Extended Digital Curation Lifecycle Model 3 The International Journal of Digital Curation Issue x, Volume x | 2xxx and heritage, based on an activity theory methodology (Kaptelinin and Nardi 2007), advocated the need for further study of disciplineand context-dependent digital curation practices, in parallel to the already happening codification of “digital curation” as a universal field, cutting across diverse use contexts and disciplines. It also foregrounded the need to account for the evolving nature of occurrence-level information objects (in a scholarly knowledge or, even, public communication context) as these objects co-evolve with successive states of scholarly/scientific and common knowledge (Dallas 2007). A conceptualisation of digital curation practice and field of inquiry, proposed on the basis of these insights,, introduced a broader digital curation lifecycle including not only the activity of appraisal, but also that of use experience, consonant with recent Web 2.0 and social computing practices; it provided for semantic notions of “knowledge enhancement” and “presentation” for digital information assets, which go beyond the syntactic notion of “tranform” in the DCC approach; and called for attention and explicit support for the overarching context management processes of goal and usage modelling, domain modelling, and management of authorities (Constantopoulos and Dallas, 2008). Despite their differences, it may be recognised that both approaches are geared towards achieving (a) trustworthiness of digital resources, (b) organisation, archiving and long-term preservation, and (c) added-value services and new uses for the resources. The latter, however, further recognizes that stakeholders in the curation of digital information include not only the custodians of preserved assets (such as librarians or data managers), but also those concerned with the production and communication of knowledge (i.e., the full spectrum of research communities), as well as the data users who are accessing this knowledge. Consequently, the validity and usefulness of digital information objects as “fit for purpose” depends, crucially, on knowledge representation that is adequate and appropriate to such a broad context. In this paper we re-examine and augment the model of digital curation proposed by the DCC, using some of the key elements of the process-oriented approach of the DCU. We do not, at present, attempt to integrate the context management processes of goal and usage modelling, domain modelling and authority management. While these processes constitute much needed components of an effective digital curation approach, as argued in (Constantopoulos and Dallas 2008), we adopt at present a stepwise approach and focus on harmonization of the process lifecycle, which, after all, is the focus of the DCC model. In particular, we argue that the digital curation lifecycle should be extended by: • The registration of the user experience while accessing the data. This user experience is recorded in session logs, in observational data and in traces produced by the interaction of the user with the resources, such as social tags, annotations, and other Web 2.0 artefacts. • An action of adding knowledge to repositories of digital resources. This added knowledge represents a new way of looking at, or combining, the primary resources and prior knowledge. Any added knowledge may itself evolve, thus producing secondary, autonomous digital resources. 4 DCC&U: An Extended Digital Curation Lifecycle Model The International Journal of Digital Curation Issue x, Volume x | 2xxx. • The inclusion of controlled vocabularies (i.e., geographic names, historical periods, chemical molecules, biological species, etc.) used by convention to denote concepts, properties and relations. Our proposed lifecycle model for digital curation aims at further assisting when planning or organizing the management of digital content, by pinpointing important curation activities that were not included in the DCC model. The enhanced model proposed here is more comprehensive than either of its constituent models; the added complexity presents, admittedly, additional implementation challenges, but is, in our view, a better match to the complexity of real world digital curation. In the next section we review the research background to digital curation. We then present the digital curation lifecycle model introduced by the DCC. Subsequently, we discuss the main features of the process-oriented approach for digital curation introduced by the DCU. Based on these two models, we outline some crucial extensions to the DCC model and introduce DCC&U as an extended lifecycle mod |
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| Language | English |
| Access Restriction | Open |
| Content Type | Text |
| Resource Type | Article |
