For almost 20 years, the World Wide Web has been gradually unraveling the traditional content ecosystem. In the old system, "content curation" was primarily a linear process performed by editors, publishers, distributors, and librarians. Today, the products of that process — articles, books, and bibliographic databases — are disintegrating into their component parts, and the lines between author and reader have become blurred. Users can not only read but also contribute to articles through comments and tags. Ordinary citizens collect field scientific data via cell phones, and researchers contribute data to a "linked cloud," where it can be mixed and matched to create new information products.

Inevitably, this fragmentation leads to new roles for information professionals, especially in the sciences, where the National Science Foundation (NSF) and other agencies are funding "data curation" projects designed to organize, preserve, and provide access to the raw material of knowledge. In this article, we'll look at how this new role has evolved, describe its tasks and challenges, and discuss implications for other content management applications.

What is "data curation?"
The word "curation" is a neologism borrowed from the museum discipline, where it refers to the selection, preservation, and display of physical artifacts. In an Internet context, it means applying human editorial processes to digital information to add value and provide access, especially through automated methods. In other words, "curation comes up when search stops working" (quote attributed to NYU professor Clay Shirky).

The digital curation concept appears today mainly in two contexts:

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Created on 5/25/2010 l Updated on May 25, 2010