The Digital Curation Exchange [DCE] (www.digitalcuratinexchange.org) has been created to serve as a space for conversation, sharing and interaction among practitioners, researchers, educators, and students of digital curation. The site has been designed to take advantage of various social networking capabilities.
These social networking tools allow registered members to create profiles, create blogs, post information in discussion forums, upload files, share links and videos, create groups, and comment on other members’ posts. All of these capabilities enable the users to maintain distinct, personal identities while also participating in and contributing to the larger community. The purpose of the site is to provide a platform for the development of this community that facilitates the sharing of knowledge across the spectrum of parties who participate in digital curation.
Digital curation is a diverse area of discourse which has been emerging and evolving in all fields that need to manage and preserve digital assets. As digital curation practice, research, and education have become more prevalent, calls for spaces to connect its disparate communities of practice have been on the rise. Responses to these calls have taken the form of conferences, workshops, journals, blogs, wikis, and a few online discussion forums. There is a continuing need to further enable and bridge conversations among the communities that are practicing, researching and teaching in the area of digital curation.
The Digital Curation Exchange [DCE] (www.digitalcuratinexchange.org) has been created to serve as a space for conversation, sharing and interaction among practitioners, researchers, educators, and students of digital curation. The site has been designed to take advantage of various social networking capabilities.
These social networking tools allow registered members to create profiles, create blogs, post information in discussion forums, upload files, share links and videos, create groups, and comment on other members’ posts. All of these capabilities enable the users to maintain distinct, personal identities while also participating in and contributing to the larger community. The purpose of the site is to provide a platform for the development of this community that facilitates the sharing of knowledge across the spectrum of parties who participate in digital curation.
The DCE now has more than 200 members and serves as a point of exchange for more than a dozen groups. A space such as this can benefit greatly from voices in the museum community. Museums have been engaged in digitization efforts for many years, and museums are increasingly acquiring born-digital materials. Museum professionals can benefit from further engagement with allied professionals around the opportunities and challenges of digital curation. The DCE is an evolving space for those managing digital collections to both share their experiences and learn from the experiences of others.
The Digital Curation Exchange is supported by funds granted by the IMLS for the Closing the Digital Curation Gap project [#LG-05-09-0040] and DigCCurr II [#RE-05-08-0060-08] at UNC-CH.
Bio
Heather Bowden is a Carolina Digital Curation Doctoral Fellow at the School of Information and Library Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her research interests are focused in digital curation, and she is working toward developing tools for the management of file formats in digital collections. She is the project manager of the Closing the Digital Curation Gap project, an IMLS/JISC funded cooperative project between UNC-CH and the DCC, designed to assess digital curation needs and to develop tools to aid in digital curation processes. She has designed and built the Digital Curation Exchange website (digitalcurationexchange.org), an online space for sharing and discussing digital curation materials, ideas, and experiences. Her goals as a researcher, developer, and educator are to continue to provide support for digital curation practices both for the layman and the professional practitioner.