A Foundational Framework for Digital Curation: The Sept Domain Model

A Foundational Framework for Digital Curation: The Sept Domain Model Stephen Abrams California Digital Library University of California Oakland, CA 94612, US Stephen.Abrams@ucop.edu ABSTRACT 1. INTRODUCTION Digital curation is a complex of actors, policies, practices, and technologies enabling successful consumer engagement with authentic content of interest across space and time. While digital curation is a rapidly maturing field, it still lacks a convincing unified theoretical foundation. A recent internal evaluation by the University of California Curation Center (UC3) of its programmatic activities led quickly to seemingly simple, yet deceptively difficult-to-answer questions. Too many fundamental terms of curation practice remain overloaded and under-formalized, perhaps none more so than “digital object.” To address these concerns, UC3 is developing a new model for conceptualizing the curation domain. While drawing freely from many significant prior efforts, the UC3 Sept model also assumes that digital curation is an inherently semiotic activity. Consequently, the model considers curated content with respect to six characteristic dimensions: semantics, syntactics, empirics, pragmatics, diplomatics, and dynamics, which refer respectively to content’s underlying abstract meaning or emotional affect, symbolic encoding structures, physical representations, realizing behaviors, evidential authenticity and reliability, and evolution through time. Correspondingly, the model defines an object typology of increasing consumer utility and value: blobs, artifacts, exemplars, products, assets, records, and heirlooms, which are respectively existential, intentional, purposeful, interpretable, useful, trustworthy, and resilient digital objects. Content engagement is modeled in terms of creator, owner, curator, and consumer roles acting within a continuum of concerns for catalyzing, organizing, and pluralizing curated content. Content policy and strategy are modeled in terms of seven high-level imperatives: predilect, collect, protect, introspect, project, connect, and reflect. A consistent, comprehensive, and conceptually parsimonious domain model is important for planning, performing, and evaluating programmatic activities in a rigorous and systematic rather than ad hoc or idiosyncratic manner. The UC3 Sept model can be used to make precise yet concise statements regarding curation intentions, activities, and results. Digital curation is a complex of actors, policies, practices, and technologies enabling successful consumer engagement with authentic content of interest across space and time. General Terms Frameworks for digital preservation. Keywords Digital curation, digital preservation, domain model, semiotics, continuum, policy, strategy. iPres 2015 conference proceedings will be made available under a Creative Commons license. With the exception of any logos, emblems, trademarks or other nominated third-party images/text, this work is available for re- use under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 unported license. Authorship of this work must be attributed. View a copy of this license. A given unit of content is of interest if it can be readily distinguished from the larger universe of potential alternative content on the basis of consumer criteria, and authentic if it is what it purports to be. A consumer's engagement is successful if the content can be feasibly exploited for use and that use is beneficial for some desired purpose, ideally at a time and place and in a manner of the consumer’s choosing. Feasibility of use depends upon intellectual and technical considerations regarding production and management, for example, selection, acquisition, arrangement, integrity, permission, visibility, etc., while the benefit of use is conditioned by individualistic purpose. It is possible that this purpose may be fulfilled only at some considerable spatio-temporal distance from the point of the content's creation; regardless, the consumer's purpose, and derived benefit, is not necessarily constrained to conform to the original intention of the content's creator, owner, or steward. Rather, every engagement is uniquely situated with respect to the context of the content’s production, its curatorial framing, and its consumer's collateral experience, expertise, and expectation. Although this context is ultimately subjective, it may nevertheless be commonly held by other consumers participating in the same domains of discourse. The curation attributes of enablement, success, engagement, authenticity, and interest are a contemporary restatement of traditional content stewardship concerns as articulated, for example, by Ranganathan's laws of library science [29]. The first law, Books are for use, shorn of its biblio-centricity, is fundamentally concerned with utility, that is, the use for purpose underlying any successful engagement with a message-bearing object. The second and third laws, Every reader his book and Every book its reader, are fundamentally concerned with ensuring an effective connection between content and consumer. The question of whether the book is what it purports to be is one of authenticity, a traditional concern of archival diplomatics that is especially important in the digital realm given content's ease of mutability. Mutability of a different sort is implicated in Ranganathan's fifth law, The library is a growing organism, which is fundamentally concerned with change, corresponding to curation concerns with content's extension across space and time. The fourth law, Save the time of the user, is fundamentally concerned with convenience, or more generally, service, and corresponds to the imperative of curating agents providing their customers with tools and services that effectively and efficiently meet their intellectual, behavioral, and technical expectations. Underlying all of these concerns is the notion that curation encompasses both preservation and use [42] [33], which are