Two Views on Digital Curation

The two articles I looked at for this post both concern digital curation. One was an article in Advertising Age called “Digital Curation Is a Key Service in Attention-Strapped Economy” and the second article is a response to the first article at a blog called Resource Shelf, which calls itself a “daily newsletter with resources of interest to information professionals, educators and journalists.”

The first article is written by Steve Rubel, who is a marketing strategist and a blogger. In his article he talks about the internet offers an endless supply of choices that far exceeds our ability to pay attention to it all (basically he is saying that supply is outstripping demand). He mentions how dominant both Facebook and Google have become. Rubel then goes on to say that no matter how dominant these two sites are they can’t hold our complete attention, in part because they “are often a mile wide and half-an-inch deep.” This leads him into bringing up digital curation, and discussing how brands (like IBM, UPS, and Microsoft, which are some of the example sites and "curation" project he gives) are starting to curate digital information to help people "find the good stuff." He doesn't spend much time discussing his thoughts on brands being curators, though, which is disappointing because the idea is intriguing.

Rubel closes by saying that both human-powered and automated digital curation “will be the next big thing to shake the web.”

I enjoyed seeing a non-information professional’s take on the internet and curation. And it was especially interesting to me how Rubel was using the term digital curation. He never really gives a definition, and seems to make it sound like a fairly simple thing, when in fact it is pretty confusing and complex. I also find it perplexing that in Rubel’s take on digital curation it is journalists who will be playing a key part in it all. I have a journalism background (and a degree in the subject that I will never use), and I can’t imagine journalists doing half the things we have discussed in class about curating information. Rubel says that journalists won’t be the only ones taking part, but he completely fails to mention information professionals at all in his article, which is what the Resource Shelf blog entry responded to.

The Resource Shelf writer says they were sad to see that librarians and information professionals were left out of Rubel’s article. Sadder still, Resource Shelf says that librarians and information professionals are often forgotten by those outside of our field when it comes to discussions like these – which seems ridiculous because who would be better at curating information than information professionals? This response article also goes on to talk about how librarians have been “curating” digital information for years (which we’ve learned) and also about how collection development will become a form of digital curation in the future, which I given much thought to before.

Apparently the blogger at Resource Shelf actually emailed Rubel about his article to invite him “a virtual tour of some of the resources librarians have been curating for years.” Hopefully Rubel responds to the blog because that could result in an enlightening discussion.

Anyway, it was just interesting to read these two different takes on digital curation. Both writers agree that digital curation is a worthy goal to work towards.