Digital Curation

Stewardship

Digital curation is the activity of maintaining and adding value to a trusted body of digital information for current and future use.

Left unattended, digital information degrades over time. Even if the information’s bits are correctly preserved (a difficult task in itself) the technological context surrounding the bits – the computing platforms, programming languages, applications, file formats, and so forth – will change sufficiently over time until the information is no longer usable. Changes in the information’s social context are just as significant. The communities and organizations involved in the information’s initial creation and use may attach different values and interpretation to the information over time, or cease to exist altogether. And the passage of time only exacerbates contemporary problems such as establishing the authenticity, quality, and provenance of the information.

Curationis the activity of maintaining a body of...

Authors and Affiliations

1. University of California-Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, USA

   Greg Janée

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Greg Janée .

Editors and Affiliations

1. Georgia Institute of Technology College of Computing, Atlanta, GA, USA

   Ling Liu

2. University of Waterloo School of Computer Science, Waterloo, ON, Canada

   M. Tamer Özsu

1. Dept. of Computer Science, UC Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, USA

   Amr El Abbadi

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