Digital Data Curation (September 12)

1. What is a collection? What is an aggregation?

2. What is the difference among the practices of preserving, curating, and aggregating data?  What are the challenges of each of these practices?

3. What are some of the tensions present in data curation?  (For example, “openness and access vs. intellectual property rights”)  How are these tensions being addressed, and how, if at all, might they be resolved?

4. How would you go about digitally preserving or documenting your family history? How much would you share, and where/how would you share it? How would you determine what to keep private, if anything? How would you organize the information? How much would you curate the collection?  (For example, would you just put up a searchable database of the digital objects, or would you create finding aids, set up browsable categories, or write an essay that provides an overview of the collection?) Would you make it easy for other people to contribute to the collection, or would it be a closed collection (limited to your own objects)?  How would you determine what objects, people, or topics belonged in the collection and what did not?

5. Knowing that archivists’ time and preservation resources aren’t unlimited, what criteria should the Library of Congress use to determine which election-related or end-of-presidential-term websites should be preserved? In what form should those websites be preserved, and through what interface should they be made findable by researchers and others?