LISTSERV 16.5 - NDSA-INFRASTRUCTURE Archives

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://anjackson.github.io/zombse/062013%20Libraries%20&%20Information%20Science/static/questions/135.html Trevor Owens and Jefferson Bailey weigh in

https://osf.io/fqvga note that she uses Digital Stewardship in her title but Digital Curation in her objective

https://scholarsphere.psu.edu/resources/56526d44-6333-4b59-ad87-260ce6830e8b/downloads/547 They use the Digital Curation lifecycle model early on, then switch to digital stewardship, and then switch back to curation

https://blogs.loc.gov/thesignal/2011/08/digital-preservation-digital-curation-digital-stewardship-what%E2%80%99s-in-some-names/ Posits stewardship as an umbrella for both curation and preservation

https://api.repository.cam.ac.uk/server/api/core/bitstreams/a3225393-e3f6-4d69-8634-6dc540309b3c/content agrees with the LOC blog

https://www.folger.edu/blogs/collation/digital-stewardship-the-one-with-all-the-definitions/ discusses stewardship and digital assets but not curation

https://zenodo.org/record/3668326 proffers a larger, more complete model than the DCC, calls it stewardship

https://ischool.sjsu.edu/digital-curation I've noticed digital curation is used more commonly in professional training opportunities/workshops

https://libraryjuiceacademy.com/certificate/digital-curation/ Again, more certifications for digital curation

https://groups.google.com/g/digital-curation/c/ehppkZT9XGs?pli=1 Chris Prom weighs in

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

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