Capturing relevant information for digital curation

Digital curation primarily involves selecting, preserving, and insuring access to a repository of digital information. We argue that metadata and rich contextual information are crucial to long-term access to digital assets. The Vidarch Project aims to develop policies and tools that help video curators discover and add contextual elements that will help future generations not only find but also make sense of video content. A key question is what context to include? We do not want to collect everything (e.g., everything in the London Times the day the video was first released) and at the same time, we want to make sure that we do not miss the most pertinent contexualizing information. Instead of leaving this problem to the effectiveness of some automated process or as a burden to the curator alone, we suggest a hybrid approach. We propose to use four different aspects of relevance to help a curator determine what contextual information to include. These aspects along with the corresponding functional parts of the system are described below. An outline of the system is given in Figure 1.