DCC&U: An Extended Digital Curation Lifecycle Model

By Panos Constantopoulos, et. al., Athena Research Center Digital Curation Unit

The International Journal of Digital Curation, Issue 1, Vol. 4, 2009

This article was written by the Digital Curation Unit (DCU) at the Athena Research Center in Athens, Greece. The goal of the paper was to compare digital curation models introduced by the Digital Curation Center (DCC) and the Digital Curation Unit (DCU). Their proposal is to combine the two models, in order to highlight the “the need to extend the digital curation lifecycle by adding provisions for the registration of usage experience, a stage for knowledge enhancement, and controlled vocabularies used by the convention to denote concepts, properties and relations.”

The authors describe some of the primary questions that are arising out of the deluge of digital information as follows: how do we ensure authenticity and integrity of information; what information do we preserve and how do we preserve it; and how do we ensure usability and accessibility, especially as its context and uses are continually changing? The DCU proposes that digital curation works to answer these questions, and that its fundamental principle is that ensuring “future fitness for purpose” of digital information requires active management and appraisal over the entire lifecycle of the digital assets.

The DCC model approaches digital information management from a lifecycle perspective and addresses authenticity, integrity, and support for predictable preservation (the original DCC model is above, left). The DCU model has grown from cultural heritage informatics and has greater concerns regarding ontologies, metadata, natural language processing and dynamic representation of data. Both models focus on the trustworthiness and preservation of information, as well as value-added services. However, the DCU model is additionally concerned with the production and communication of knowledge as well as information about the users of this knowledge. Here, the “fit for purpose” depends on “adequate and appropriate” representation of the data.

I appreciate the DCU’s consideration that knowledge enhancement as an essential component of the curation lifecycle. It takes into account the increasing use of Web 2.0 and Semantic Web technologies, and helps to differentiate the concept of data curation from the slightly-more-straightforward digital archiving or digital libraries. In order to understand the goals of digital curation, it is important to understand not only the lifecycle needs but also the expectations of any collection of digital information and knowledge.

The enhanced model, above right, incorporates knowledge enhancement (into the “Curate and Preserve” ring), authority’s information – in the form of controlled vocabularies, etc. (into the “Description and Representation Information” ring), and user experience (following “Access, Use and Reuse” in the outer ring). This can be compared to the original, seen below in Ramona’s blog about the Edinburgh Mouse Atlas Project case study conducted by the DCC.

I am interested in following this and future proposals regarding the original DCC model to watch how it evolves as refinements are suggested. Is a “unified theory” feasible, or will models vary based on the function, use and expectation of the digital information.