https://blog.still-water.net/three-year-study-shows-60-increase-in-demand-for-digital-curation/
The good news is that digital curation jobs more than doubled in the past year. The bad news is that 2022 saw 376 different digital curation job titles, with none reaching double digit percentages of the total. These are all *unique titles*, from straightforward names like Records and Information Management Specialist or Metadata Librarian to weird names like Hidden Collections Processing Coordinator or Change Management Professional.
As a nod to the way digital practice is dissolving boundaries between traditional disciplines, we saw an uptick in portmanteau titles such as Archive Curator, Digital Archives Librarian, and Special Collections Instruction Librarian and Curator.
Coincidentally, perhaps, the word “steward” has appeared in a number of these titles, most related to data. These included Research Data Steward, Professor in Data Stewardship, and Digital Preservation and Stewardship Head. Curiously, one of the job openings had a title incorporating both terms: "Data Curator (Research Domain Digital Stewardship Specialist)"
As fun as it is to contemplate titles like "Byzantine Numismatic Cataloguer & Linked-open-data Coordinator," this insane proliferation of terms is confusing to job-seekers and employee-seekers alike. This list could vote on a single recommendation, I suppose, but that might be too controlling. Maybe Nick has the right idea to pick a term and make it your own.
jon
______________________________
Jon Ippolito
Professor of New Media
Director, Digital Curation graduate program
The University of Maine
https://DigitalCuration.UMaine.edu
Twitter: @jonippolito
Thanks for your input, Nick, and for validating my confusion. I agree that there are too many vague definitions floating amongst groups (and I also have some graphic design qualms with the DCC model). I also agree that we must just pick a term, though I hate feeling like we are contributing to confusion. We librarians are supposed to operate with more precision than this!
We currently have one strong advocate for digital stewardship in our ranks, but I lean towards digital curation because our committee work includes a large focus on coordinating lifecycle actions/assignments among units, and also because we are considering not just our digital archival materials, but also scholcomm digital content and data. Curation seems to be the more common parlance that applies to multiple content types.
If anyone is dying to contemplate the etymology of these two terms with me further, here are more examples of these terms being defined in the wild, very differently from link to link:
https://osf.io/fqvga note that she uses Digital Stewardship in her title but Digital Curation in her objective Interestingly, I can't find a definition for digital stewardship on the NDSA website.
Have a great day!
Lindsey
Hi Lindsey,
In my experience, the overarching terms like curation and stewardship never have satisfactory definitions because each organization that claims to do them also has very different underlying processes. I've run into similar problems with DAM, digital preservation, and digital archives. It doesn't help that the definitions tend to be so abstract in their own usage of words.
For example, on the DCC Curation Lifecycle Model there is a second ring that alternates between curate and preserve. That makes it seem like either half of the activities (according to the second circle) or all of the activities (according to the name of the model) are curation.
Internally, my greatest vocab success has been to pick a term, define the activities that I want that term to encompass, and be ready to repeat the term and the activities as often as necessary. E.g. Digital preservation at NYPL exists to ensure the long-term accessibility of digital objects in the collection by supporting their acquisition or creation and managing their ingest and storage.
If your committee is in a quagmire comparing the meaning of these terms, maybe it would be better get the committee to pick the term that sounds best to them and then require that it is used exclusively.
-Nick
Does anyone know if there an authoritative definition of "digital stewardship" out there, particularly one defining its relationship to the term "digital curation," which has been fairly well defined across the pond by the Digital Curation Centre's Digital Curation Lifecycle model? Asking for an internal taskforce stymied by the number of nigh-interchangeable terms for work with digital content.
Does anyone feel strongly about the use of one over the other, and if so, which do they use when?
I am currently brewing a theory that digital stewardship is used to designate both collecting and preservation lifecycle work, but only within the specific realm of libraries and archives doing cultural heritage digitization and born-digital tasks. I see digital curation in use more broadly to refer to the same activities in scholarly research and communications communities, in addition to pockets of GLAM. This indicates, to me, that curation the wider term and stewardship the narrower. However, the SAA Dictionary (which has a good but inconclusive set of citations for both terms) designates the stewardship as the wider term and curation as the more narrow term (
https://dictionary.archivists.org/entry/digital-stewardship.html). Does NDSA agree with SAA?
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Lindsey Memory
Digital Content Manager
Digital Initiatives Department Head
1157 BYU Library
(801) 422-6723