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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 On Tue, May 23, 2023, 08:55 Lindsey Memory <[log in to unmask]> wrote: > 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? > > -- > > Lindsey Memory > > Digital Content Manager > > Digital Initiatives Department Head > > 1157 BYU Library > > (801) 422-6723 > > >