Digital Curation: Fundamentals and Sustainability

What does digital curation involve and how do practitioners and organizations achieve good practice for curating their digital content and collections? There is a growing and evolving set of standards-based good practice for digital curation that enable practitioners, managers, and organizations to engage in sustainable digital curation to effectively manage digital content across generations of technologies and through organizational change. This course covers core digital curation concepts, principles, standards, and current trends and highlights potential implications and recommendations for archives and archivists.
This course replaces two previous one-day courses, Digital Curation: Fundamentals for Success and Digital Curation: Planning & Sustainable Futures. In 2021, the instructors revised content to offer as a six-session seminar that will be offered online over six weeks.

Upon completion of this course you’ll be able to:

• Explain the components of digital curation and possible implications for archives
• Complete a gap analysis to leverage your strengths and address weaknesses to develop your digital curation capacity  
• Find and use community resources, frameworks, models, standards, and examples of good practice relevant to your digital curation requirements and priorities
• Foster relationships within and beyond your organization to achieve digital curation objectives
• Evaluate current technological options that meet your digital curation needs
• Develop strategies for sustaining digital curation at your organization

Who should attend? 
Practicing archivists, librarians, museum professionals, as well as managers and administrators from these organizations, who will be asked to develop and curate digital archives or need to improve the operation of such archives should attend. This course will also be useful to a wide range of information professionals whose institutions are beginning to discuss management of digital business records, publications, archival content, research data, and other digital content.

What should you know already? 
Appraisal of records, providing access to records, some knowledge of digital preservation and electronic records, and at least intermediate knowledge of digital archives. This course builds on others, such as Basics of Managing Digital Records, Standards for Digital Archives, Thinking Digital, Building Advocacy and Support for Digital Archives, Digital Records: The Next Steps, and Digital Repositories.