President/Founder of DPCI

As President of DPCI, Joe directs all operations, business development, R&D, partnerships and marketing activities at the company.

Joe enjoys blogging about various trends in content technologies, on project management best practices, and also on his insights into the operations of running the business of DPCI.

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December 02, 2008

Curating Content

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I recently had a nice state-of-the-book industry chat with a friend who works at a higher education book publisher. Her job is essentially to think up and implement new products with existing content that her company retains the intellectual property rights to.

During the conversation, we started reminiscing about college days when we needed to go to the reference section of the university library to check out a packet of photocopied ancillary material that the professor selected to augment the core texts. I remember how unpleasant an experience that was, principally since only several copies were ever made available and if they were checked out, you had to wait. Other professors were a bit more generous if not ecologically deficient by allowing us to purchase packets of those copies at the beginning of the semester. This was 20 years ago.

Today, much of what we call ancillary material may be found readily available online. Either these higher education publishers offer it up as value-add services, or the universities themselves have content available, both from its own academicians as well as in partnership with other institutions around the globe.

However, there is a massive opportunity for additional materials on the Web to serve as ancillary material on virtually any subject. Much of that content is free -- some of it is indexed and available for purchase after a google search. Some of it may or may not be edited properly or from an authoritative source, so essentially the student (or pedagogue) can take their chances and maybe get lucky with some interesting and fresh content from an unvalidated source.

My friend used a term that I had not considered before in the context of vetting all of these materials across a range of categories. She said that this content needs to be 'curated.' At first I thought that might not be an adequate term, since curating collections of materials seemed to connote getting them ready for some kind of exhibition (museum, art, etc). I visited a few online dictionaries to get a clearer sense of the term.

After being distracted by the religious meaning of the word, I saw at dictionary.com the definition "to organize and oversee". With Websters online, a definition for a curator is presented as "the custodian of a collection." Websters also does a nice job fleshing out the occupation of curator, and so the link is worthwhile exploring.

It occurs to me that content is far more than text these days -- you are able to find images, video, and various kinds of textual content types (wiki, bliki, blog, microblog, forum, article/story, etc) that are all interrelated, all require some authentication, and all must be tied together in some cohesive way. This is beyond the work of an editor, in my mind, and in fact may approach more of the work that a curator performs.

It also occurs to me as I spend far more time on twitter, socialmedian, digg and other social-media sites that 'mavens' -- those we follow who are the rockstars of these platforms -- are essentially curating content for us all. We would need an endless number of lifetimes to read all the content available to us on the Web, even with the available filtering technologies that search engines offer us. However, the social-media rockstar (whats a good term for those people? they're not making news so much as filtering it and presenting it back to the rest of us) are filtering out the content -- presenting important content, sorting the relevant from the meaningless or inaccurate and debunking the latter.

This isn't to say that these social-media leaders have any hegemony on the relevance or authenticity of any content on the Web. However, if enough people have an affinity for that person so as to follow them, the wisdom of the crowds seems to suggest that the leader may be in a better position to signify the value and relevance of content better than the average content consumer.

If that person then goes ahead and begins to select feeds of content and organize it on a platform -- say like Guy Kawasaki is attempting to do with alltop.com or Jason Goldberg is allowing participants in his social network platform socialmedian to do for themselves, are these not examples of content curation? No one on Alltop or socialmedian or digg for that matter is doing any editorial work on the content. They are simply selecting what is valuable or interesting or relevant, then asking the masses to rate that content and comment on it. What a remarkable trend when you consider that the combined forces of the thought leader with the vox populi can validate the quality and relevance of content like never before in history.

Let me know if I'm stretching on this one...this idea is just developing in my mind so if you've thought this through I'd love to hear your comments/feedback.

Posted at 03:04 pm by Joseph Bachana

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Federation of curation

Submitted by Craig McEldowney (not verified) on Tue, 12/02/2008 - 19:29.

Your proposition is somewhat the reverse of the old community model where forum members become active participants, majority content producers, then can get promoted to have more administrative (pseudo editorial) roles, and on. In this model, the leaders/moderators/editors essentially work their way up from the mail room. In this model, it's more of a top-down approach, where the thought leader is the center of the community, then leverages a specific toolset to federate out data management/enrichment (curatorial really is a good term for this) responsibilities. It's an exciting model because the thought leader, or affinity group leader, is in a position to share best practices down to the rest of the community, to develop a self-regulating data ecosystem where new content is efficiently "processed", cross-linked, associated, keyworded, etc. The frustration comes from the fact that none of this is standardized (yet?). Without some over-arching data model, we potentially lose one significant portion of the puzzle-- forging those associations and relationships across community groups and social networks. Without some standard form of defining and encoding relationships between pieces of content, it becomes a challenge to merge those relationships into the larger scheme of things. Semantic Web as a concept certainly seems to capture this, but as a methodology, it certainly is in its infancy.

Scientific Content Needs to be Curated

Submitted by dave tribbett (not verified) on Fri, 04/16/2010 - 14:28.

Good post, here's a couple posts that link digital content to the library, also discusses the importance of curating in a digital age. The librarians need to somehow get control of the important content otherwise its the wild west! Here are the links: Curating content and Information and Content topics

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