“Designated Communities”: Through the Lens of the Web

The notion of a “designated community” has always been a rather elusive concept across the digital curation landscape. This paper is an effort to revisit the concept to stir up new discussions in the area. More specifically, this study offers a perspective on designated communities through the lens of the web, powered by developments in the last ten years in social media. The research presents a multi-faceted analysis of communities based on HTML content from online web pages to propose heuristics for defining designated communities based on the technology they adopt, properties of knowledge organisation, and how they link to each other. This impacts the building of quantifiable models of designated communities, estimating curation risks associated to the community and further, refining approaches to preservation strategies that meet the needs of the community