Digital Content Curation and Why It Matters to Librarians

The concept of digital content curation (often referred to simply as digital curation; the term “content” is inserted here to avoid confusion with the work of digital archivists) is an increasingly common phenomenon across the Web. The idea behind curation, sometimes called aggregation, is linking and or excerpting the work of others (Carr 2012). Just as physical curators carefully select material from their collections to display or showcase for visitors, digital curators carefully select electronic content for users, often repackaging it in new ways. Examples are found on sites like the Huffington Post (http://www. huffingtonpost.com), which excerpts work from around the Web, often to the extent that there’s no need for users to click through to the original source of the content. Other examples are found on sites like Longreads (http://longreads.com), which links to longform journalism, with the links coming from users tweeting recommendations using the #longreads Twitter hashtag, and Flipboard (http://flipboard.com), a popular mobile application of curated web content that displays in a magazine-like form. Storify (http://www.storify.com) allows users to curate social media, like tweets, YouTube videos, and Facebook posts, and then publish them as a whole work, either on the Storify site or embedded in a webpage. To a certain extent, the Web has always been about curation, with users sharing links with each other. Many blogs can be considered curated content, with bloggers sharing links and excerpts with readers. The Drudge Report (http://drudgereport.com), which has linked to select news articles and sites since the 1990s, can be considered curated news. What’s changing online is the amount of content that’s being shared versus the amount that’s being created. Platforms like Tumblr (http://www.tumblr.com) and Pinterest