Decoding Digital Curation for Cultural Heritage: A Survey and Extended Proposal

Digital curation in cultural heritage organizations is becoming more and more established as a practice as empirical research into tools, techniques, skills, standards and best practices in particular contexts emerge. Curators typically tackle technical obsolescence, ignorance of good practices, uncertainty over appropriate infrastructure as well as lack of resources. Digital curation activities are complex processes that involve diverse skills and techniques, software tools and systems, and a range of professional and paraprofessional practices. The lack of acknowledged models opens the way to the usage of algorithmic approaches as an alternative/support/aid to human curation, especially as personal filters and as generators of public experiences realized through machine learning and virtual reality tools. However, the relationship of curation with materials and their digital counterparts lacks an encompassing effective framework. Here, we claim that an encompassing framework of digital curation is strongly needed: this would provide and open to the development of software environments in support. It addresses all the phases that concern the digital curation activities, as well as broader technological factors impacting digital curation practice. Therefore, this research, on the one hand, formulates a definition of digital curation and then discusses the involved activities and the roles and responsibilities of the digital curators; on the other hand, it unpacks the notions of semantic encoding and argues for the importance of the data lifecycle and of metadata to digital curation. Finally, it addresses researcher behaviours and the ways in which multidisciplinarity, collective practice, and collaboration shape the sharing and reuse of data in the context of the knowledge transfer. In developing or following an appropriate digital curation workflow, designers should consider issues such as scope (what services will be offered and to which audiences), best user experience practices or community outreach or both, and model’s ability to represent work practices. The focus of the research will be on digital curation tools that are interactive, pervasive, multimodal, physical and social for further research on examining how we can better map human perceptions and experiences of the built environment. Although this is a mainly survey-type investigation, this research will also draw on other disciplines, including design, cultural heritage, science, and technology. It aims to surface similarities and differences in digital curation activities, as well as broader technological factors impacting digital curation practice.This project is also related to a project called "Be- archaeo" which is funded by the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie, Grant Agreement N°. 82382