Digital Curation beyond the 'Wild Frontier': a Pragmatic Approach

Costis Dallas, 700 King Str W, Toronto, ON, M5V 2Y6, Canada Department of Communication, Media and Culture, Panteion University; Faculty of Information, University of Toronto; Digital Cura-tion Unit, IMIS-Athena Research Centre Email: [email protected]

Author’s pre-publication version (28 June 2015). Accepted for publication in Archival Science. Published version may differ to this manuscript. Please do not cite before publication.

Digital curation beyond the ‘wild frontier’: a pragmatic approach

Costis Dallas*

Abstract

This paper advocates the necessity of developing a pragmatic alternative to the dominant custodial theori-zation of digital curation as an “umbrella concept for digital preservation, data curation, electronic records, and digital asset management”. Starting from a historical account and an examination of prevalent defini-tions, it points to the current dependence of digital curation on a prescriptive approach rooted in its cog-nate field of digital preservation, and aiming to serve the needs of professional stewardship. It demon-strates the disconnect of this theorization with the rich historical traditions of museum curatorship where the notion of curation originated, and its inability to act as a framework for understanding the diversity and pervasiveness of contemporary digital curation practices “in the wild” (such as content curation, per-sonal archiving, and pro-am digitization), and its dependence on a “wild frontier” ideology dissonant with contemporary critical cultural heritage scholarship. The alternative, pragmatic approach views digital cu-ration as a “contact zone” practice, routinely performed by a broad range of actors including researchers, artists, users and communities, on dynamically evolving objects, domain knowledge representations and interactions, beyond the curation lifecycle prescribed for custodial environments. On this basis, this study calls for a formal re-conceptualization of digital curation, adequate knowledge representation of its objects, evidence-based research on curation practices, and establishment of curation-enabled digital infrastruc-tures suitable for curation in the continuum. Reaching beyond a custodial view, this approach aims to es-tablish digital curation as a field of intellectual inquiry relevant to emerging pervasive curation practices in the digital environment. Keywords digital curation; digital archiving; practice studies; records continuum; e-infrastructure

Introduction

Fourteen years since it was first introduced in the Digital curation: digital archives, libraries, and e-science seminar (Beagrie and Pothen 2001), digital curation is now established as a recognizable inter-disciplinary field of knowledge and professional specialization with growing impact on the manage-ment of digital collections and research data, and on the specification and audit of trusted repositories and digital research infrastructures. In the last decade, it captured the imagination of a growing inter-

COSTIS DALLAS, DIGITAL CURATION BEYOND THE WILD FRONTIER: A PRAGMATIC APPROACH 2


national community of practitioners and researchers from the disciplines of library and information science, archival science, and computing. With financial and policy support by agencies such as the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) in the UK, the 6th and 7th Research Framework Pro-grammes of the European Commission, and the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) in the United States, digital curation now forms an extensive ecosystem of institutional bases, research projects and initiatives, professional specialization curricula and programs, and digital infrastructures, tools and services.

The institutional growth of digital curation was spearheaded, since 2004, by the work of the Digital Curation Centre (DCC) in the United Kingdom (Rusbridge et al. 2005); its comprehensive Curation Reference Manual (Ross and Day 2010; Davidson and Ashley 2012) encapsulates the collective know-how of an international community of leading researchers and practitioners, its International Digital Curation Conference attracts an increasing number of delegates every year, and the International Jour-nal of Digital Curation (http://www.ijdc.net) it publishes is established as a focus for the regular publi-cation of peer-reviewed research on the subject. Across the Atlantic, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has become a hub for thinking on digital curation professional education, following the inception of its Preserving Access to Our Digital Future: Building an International Digital Curation Curriculum (DigCCurr) initiative in 2006 (Hank et al. 2010). The Greek Digital Curation Unit (DCU) was established as part of the Athena Research Centre in 2007, with an ambitious interdisciplinary re-search agenda (Constantopoulos and Dallas 2008). Several other institutional initiatives for digital cu-ration work emerged since in Europe and North America, including those of the University of Califor-nia, Johns Hopkins University, the iSchool of the University of Toronto, and Purdue University (Hig-gins 2011).

Digital curation appears indeed to have come of age. Digital curation courses proliferate in infor-mation studies and archival science curricula; specialized graduate programs on digital curation are already offered in Sweden by the Luleå University of Technology, in the United Kingdom by King’s College London, Aberystwyth University and Robert Gordon University, and in the United States by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC SILS 2014), by the University of Maine (Ippolito 2014), the University of Maryland, and, in the context of a museum studies program, by Johns Hopkins University (Ray 2014). The publication of the first scholarly overview on digital curation (Yakel 2007) has been followed by that of a “how to do it manual” (Harvey 2010a) and of a specialised bibliography on the topic (Bailey 2013), while recent publications hail “[t]he emergence of a new discipline” (Hig-gins 2011) and “[t]he rise of digital curation” (Ray 2012).

Nevertheless, ambiguity still persists as to what digital curation is, what it is of, how it manifests it-self, and what may be its distinct identity as a domain of intellectual inquiry and professional compe-tence. While an analysis of the revision history of the digital curation lemma in Wikipedia shows that its definition seems to have recently stabilized (Wikipedia 2013), different, even contradictory, uses of the term abound in practice. The fact that digital curation is regularly mentioned in tandem with digi-tal preservation, the field of research and professional practice from which it originated (Ross 2004;

http://www.ijdc.net/



Giaretta and Weaver 2005; Engelhardt 2013), and that many researchers and practitioners are affiliated almost indistinguishably with both topics, raises the question how distinctive might digital curation be from digital preservation as a research field and professional specialization. To add to the ambiguity, diverse disciplinary traditions including archival science (Ross 2012), library and information science (Palmer et al. 2008), archaeology and museum studies (Dallas 2007a), and art curating (Wolff et al. 2012; Rinehart and Ippolito 2014) lay claim to the intellectual foundations of digital curation.

On the other hand, opposition to digital curation has been reported “from fields that had already employed ‘curator’ in job titles, such as museums” (Ray 2012). This is hardly surprising as, de-spite the inclusiveness professed by the digital curation community, museum curators still remain the “single species […] missing from this Noah’s ark” of scholars and practitioners actively en-gaged with digital curation (Dallas 2007a). In the context of archival science, Adrian Cunningham considers the concept “inappropriate for a lot of what recordkeeping professionals do because it suggests antiquarian scholarship rather than modern information management”, and adds that “the curation of digital records [our emphasis] is a sufficiently distinct curatorial activity as to warrant the use of a different term – digital archiving” (Cunningham 2008). And, finally, some fragmentation and a potential shift of perspective is already evident as influential workers sidestep digi-tal curation in favour of related concepts such as data curation (Weber et al. 2012; Palmer et al. 2013) and digital stewardship (Harvey 2010b; Mahard and Harvey 2013).

Elizabeth Yakel’s call “to monitor and to see whether digital curation does indeed become the umbrella concept for digital preservation, data curation, electronic records, and digital asset management” (Yakel 2007) remains, thus, timely today. But this framing of digital curation as an um-brella concept is problematized by the emergence of practices of digital curation “in the wild” (Dallas 2011; Fernie and Dallas 2013) bearing little resemblance to those encountered and discussed in the context of the custodial environments and managed infrastructures, which mainstream digital curation methodologies and tools are designed to address. Notably, the digital curation community has so far found it difficult to accept content (or Web) curation – a common practice in the online environment with major implications for digital information and communication (Scime 2009; Liu 2010; Stanoevska-Slabeva et al. 2012) – as digital curation proper, dismissing it as an unwelcome synonym pointing to little more than mere aggregation or “channelization” of content (Wikipedia 2013) and largely ignoring it in its dedicated conferences and journals: indeed, a Google Scholar fielded search of the contents of papers published in the period 2007-2015 in the International Journal of Digital Cura-tion (the leading specialized journal in the field) reveals null results for the terms “content curation” and “web curation”, practices such as “crowdsourcing” and “remix”, as well as for references to leading content curation platforms such as “Pinterest”, “Pocket”, “Feedly” and “paper.li”, while none of the five references to “Facebook” in the whole corpus of these journal papers touches on issues related to con-tent curation.

The practice of content curation evidently constitutes a new and important form of purposeful digi-tal content generation, aggregation, selection and presentation of digital resources on the Web, which,



however, cannot be addressed fully in the context of current approaches to digital curation. More gen-erally, the rise of phenomena such as “dark data” in scholarly communication (Heidorn 2009), personal digital archiving (Gemmell et al. 2006; Lee 2011), crowdsourcing and “user-generated content” (Howe 2006; van Dijck 2009; Oomen and Aroyo 2011), digital communities and social media (Rheingold 1993; Blanchard and Horan 1998; O’Reilly 2007; Kaplan and Haenlein 2010), produce patterns of digi-tal resource production, management and use that blur the boundaries of what is (to be) curated, where it resides, at what point it may or may not be curated, by whom, and what curation consists of in that context.

On the origins of ‘digital curation’

The field of digital curation emerged in the beginning of the 21st century from the confluence between developments in digital preservation research and professional work on the one hand, and e-science data management and systems specification considerations on the other. John Taylor, then Director General of the UK’s joint Research Councils, actually coined the term “digital curation” in an e-science policy meeting in London in 2001 with the specific intent “to distinguish the actions involved in caring for digital data beyond its original use, from digital preservation”, adding that the “[a]cquisition and curation of very large valuable collections of primary data” is a key function of the e-science information infrastructure (Taylor 2001; Lord and Macdonald 2003). Shortly thereaf-ter, digital curation appeared in the title, and became the focus, of an invitational seminar organized in London by the Digital Preservation Coalition and the British National Space Centre, aim-ing “to raise the profile of the Open Archival Information System Reference Model (OAIS) standard in the UK and share practical experience of digital curation in the digital library sec-tor, archives, and e-sciences” (Pothen 2001).

According to Neil Beagrie, organizer of the 2001 invitational seminar, the notion of digital curation was originally introduced as a means of transferring the curatorial approaches of “the library and mu-seum sector”, combining it with the more recent usage of the term in the biological sciences, to the realm of digital collections:

In the library and museum sector curation centres on well-established concepts of added value from themed collection-building around physical objects (the sum being greater than the parts); from the documentation accompanying individual objects and collections which provides the relevant context and history for research, learning, and discovery; and from the skills, domain expertise, and knowledge of the staff, the curators of the collections. […] “Digital curation” was used […] as a term to explicitly transfer existing curatorial approaches to digital collections, and also to highlight some of the changes that are needed in approaches to curation of digital as op-posed to analogue artefacts. (Beagrie 2008)



The library sector was well-represented in the 2001 seminar, and the reference to a unified “library and museum sector” reflects contemporary debates on the convergence between libraries, archives and museums. Yet, as confirmed by an informal analysis using the Google Books Ngram Viewer (Petrov and Das 2013) and reference sources, the early history of curation and the even earlier use of the relat-ed terms of curatorship and curator is related predominantly to museums, and not libraries. In the in-terest of piecing together the origins of curation as a concept and practice, it serves to examine briefly the genealogy of the term and its historical adoption in the field.

The Oxford English Dictionary lists the term curation in its first edition (1884), defined among other meanings as curatorship, which in turn is defined as “the office or position of a curator”; an early use in the context of collections, “acceptance of the curatorship of Zoological Society”, is first attested in 1861. The meaning of curator, the older word used to define both curatorship and, indirectly, curation, includes “[t]he officer in charge of a museum, gallery of art, library, or the like; a keeper, custodian. In many cases, the official title of the chief keeper”; among earliest uses, the dictionary cites “[t]he Curator of the Royal Society” as early as 1667, and “[t]he Curators of the British Museum” in 1767 (Murray 1893). Nevertheless, the notions of curation and curator to denote the person in charge of all tasks di-rectly related to objects in a museum collection (i.e. their preservation, research and communication) become firmly established in the English speaking world only as late as the 19th century (Desvallées and Mairesse 2010), their generalized use coinciding with the rise of museum professionalism (Teather 1990).

On the other hand, the identity of a museum curator remains diverse from the late 19th century to date. In her study of the origins of museum professionalism in Britain, museologist Lynne Teather re-counts the words of James Paton who, speaking to the Museums Association in 1894, addresses both “the specialist who belongs to the great public and national museums” and the “provincial curator who has to do everything in his own much-embracing institution”. As she notes, while in this early period “the museum worker was often considered a servant-caretaker […] there were many different, sometimes conflicting, images of the curator as self-indulgent, a public enthusiast, amateur, scientist or ‘museum man’” (Teather 1990). During the 20th century, the production of knowledge be-comes increasingly recognized as a central element of a museum curator’s competence and work: “a first-class curator in a first-class natural history museum is [...] primarily a research scientist, but he may be a teacher as well. He is a curator, too, and he may be something of an exhibi-tor” (Colbert 1958). Technical activities – tasks such as the compilation of an accession register or the preparation of an exhibition label that may be specified precisely in advance and executed predictably – are distinguished from curatorial responsibilities, which encompass “scholarly/scientific investiga-tion, education (in its widest sense), and the safe custody, including conservation, of objects”, the latter are often distributed now among a “college of curators” possessing complementary special-ized competencies (Horie 1986), and displacing the once reigning “scholar-curator”, a product of 18th and 19th century connoisseurship originally entrusted with the full lifecycle of acquiring, researching,



cataloguing, documenting and interpreting collections, and communicating their value through exhi-bition, publication and programming (Boylan 2006).

The diversity of practices and roles of museum curators is attested in further studies based on con-ducting ethnographic research in a museum (Macdonald 2002), assessing personal reports by museum professionals (Kavanagh et al. 2005), or analyzing life history interviews and shifting the focus from “what is a curator” to “who is a curator”, that is, to the identification of personal curatorial identities (Sandino 2012). Nevertheless, while the term has also been used recently to identify senior museum professionals in charge of any division or department (as in “curator of education”), mainstream usage distinguishes mostly between two roles: firstly, a museum curator in the original meaning of the term, typically “a specialist in a particular academic discipline relevant to the museums’ collections”, who oversees all aspects of collections-related work, from acquisitions to collections care and management, curatorial research and active interpretation of collections through exhibitions and programming, and who may also have overall responsibilities in running a museum (Zenetou 1996; Lord and Lord 1997); and secondly, since the 1960s and 1970s, a contemporary art curator, the person responsible for curat-ing all creative aspects of a contemporary art exhibition, from concept and programmatic text to exhib-it selection and installation. Both groups have become agents of increasingly active curatorial practice in the last thirty years, affording them unprecedented social capital and agency: museum curators, on the one hand, on account of the major investment made by especially larger museums on the concep-tualization and development of exhibitions garnering them record numbers of visitors; and contempo-rary art curators, on the other, by virtue of the impact of the Biennale phenomenon, the growing ap-preciation of art exhibitions as oeuvres, and their role as agents of value and valuation (Heinich and Pollak 1989; Brenson 1998; O’Neill 2007; Acord 2010).

Museum curatorship, as a historically evolving practice, does embody the notion of active interven-tion and knowledge enrichment of collections across the various stages of the museum object infor-mation life cycle; pace Yakel, who views “the idea of curatorship as a passive activity (which is how it is sometimes seen when dealing with analog materials)” in opposition to digital curation as an “active and potentially interactive process” (Yakel 2007; cf. Cunningham 2008), museum curatorial work resonates fully with the emphasis on active change and on adding value through caring for and managing actively the information objects in a collection. But, beyond custodianship, it is also inextricably linked with the study of cultural heritage collections, the production of scholarly knowledge through research and publication, and the establishment of cultural meaning through selec-tion, arrangement, and interpretation, and contestation of meaning through the encounter with source communities and exhibition publics. This broader dimension of evolving curatorial practices in the museum field offers a salient counterpoint to the identity adopted by digital curation in the first decade of the twenty first century as a ‘standard science’ tied to a canonical body of knowledge, normative epis-temology, and professional instrumentality.



Digital preservation by any other name?

The rapid development of the field of digital curation was initially tied to the research data manage-ment concerns of eScience. A Digital Curation Task Force was convened as early as 2002 in the UK, to address the pressing need related with the towering accumulation of primary scientific research data and its future use. As noted in the preamble of the meeting report:

We are entering an era in which digital data resources are becoming a central pillar of scientific research. […] The data generated in this deluge requires active management to meet basic needs of access and re-use: data needs to be retained so that it survives, so that it can be found and retrieved as appropriate, understood within and across disci-plines, and re-use must be possible; this needs to happen efficiently, fairly and afforda-bly in contexts we cannot today predict. But in addition, digital technology may offer opportunities to incorporate such data more valuably into the knowledge base and ex-tend the reach and value of the data. Ambition in this area could be rewarded by sub-stantial and enduring benefit and scientific advance. (Lord and Macdonald 2003)

In fact, as noted by Chris Rusbridge, then director of the UK’s Digital Curation Centre, “the para-doxical case with digital curation” is that its definition refers to activities that organisations in diverse disciplinary communities have been engaging with already for about thirty years – among them, those working with physical repositories, such as libraries, archives and muse-ums (Rusbridge 2007). As Cal Lee and Helen Tibbo assert, the “set of strategies, technological ap-proaches, and activities now termed ‘digital curation’” is the result of “[a]lmost two decades of work in digital preservation and access since the Taskforce on Digital Archiving report (Garrett and Waters 1996) to the Commission on Preservation and Access (CPA) and the Research Libraries Group (RLG)” (Lee and Tibbo 2007). Highly cited scholars use habitually the phrase “digital curation and preserva-tion” to define the field (Giaretta and Weaver 2005; Rusbridge et al. 2005; Rieger 2008; Wallis et al. 2008; Hedges et al. 2009; Walters and Skinner 2011; Ross 2012). And, as Cunningham observes, “digital curation” is often used interchangeably with “digital archiving”: “They should not be”, he exclaims, sug-gesting that “[j]ust as archiving (the management of archives and records) is but one form of curation, so too is digital archiving just one form of digital curation” (Cunningham 2008). While Philip Lord and Alison Macdonald had sought as early as 2003 to differentiate these related concepts by suggesting that “preservation is an aspect of archiving, and archiving is an activity needed for curation”, they still consider them to be part of an integrated endeavour, noting that “[a]ll three are concerned with man-aging change over time” (Lord and Macdonald 2003).

In comparison to digital curation, digital preservation, defined as “the series of managed activities necessary to ensure continued access to digital materials for as long as necessary” (Jones and Beagrie 2001), remains the focus of a larger, and ostensibly more mature community of research and profes-sional practice: a prime mover towards the development of large-scale trusted data repositories, and of standards, methodologies and research agendas aimed to ensure the trustworthiness, sustainability and



quality of such repositories, and the authenticity and integrity of research data they are entrusted with in the long term (Garrett and Waters 1996; Hedstrom and Ross 2007; CCSDS 2007). The emphasis of digital curation to future access and reuse echoes closely the concern of digital preservation with sup-porting “temporal interoperability” (Hedstrom 2001) and “meaningful usability”, i.e., “to allow future users to retrieve, access, decipher, view, interpret, understand and experience documents, data, and records in meaningful and valid (that is, authentic) ways” (Rothenberg 2000).

While the assertion that in the context of digital curation “the use of terms such as ‘archiving’, ‘preservation’, and ‘data’ can mean different things to different groups and there is often a deeply em-bedded local usage, which professions are reluctant to change” (Beagrie 2008) remains valid today, there is, nevertheless, some evidence to indicate a consolidation of community opinion on what digital curation is, whom it concerns, and how it operates on the plane of institutional, educational and re-search agendas (Tibbo and Lee 2010; Higgins 2011). This conclusion is supported by an examination of actual definitions of digital curation introduced so far by institutional centres and scholars in the field (Table 1).

What is apparent in these definitions, and what transcends from current activity in the research and professional field of digital curation, is the centrality placed on data, information, or digital assets. There are notable semantic differences between these three concepts, but it may readily be concluded from a comparative examination that data is the pivotal concept, especially if taken broadly not to be limited to formatted data, but to be co-extensional with documents, covering also non-textual docu-ments (Buckland 1997). In fact data (in some definitions restricted even further to digital research da-ta) is deemed by the UK Digital Curation Centre to be at the core of the digital curation enterprise:

Data, any information in binary digital form, is at the centre of the Curation Lifecycle. This in-cludes: Digital Objects: simple digital objects (discrete digital items such as text files, image files or sound files, along with their related identifiers and metadata) or complex digital objects (dis-crete digital objects made by combining a number of other digital objects, such as websites; and Databases: structured collections of records or data stored in a computer system. (DCC 2015)

Being in the business of discipline-building, seeking pole position in grant programs and institu-tional support, and striving to create a bridge between the custodial traditions of cultural heritage and the more well-funded application context of scientific research, industrial and organizational record-keeping, the digital curation community aligned readily with an agenda of canonization tending to universal applicability rather than specific fit. This dominant approach extended to concepts, methods and instruments. Consequently, research and policy priorities of the field focussed on issues of general, rather than domain-specific, validity, including organisational and technical issues regarding trusted information repositories, general preservation planning and risk manage-ment methods and tools, generic preservation metadata, and economic models. This is mani-fested in the great majority of articles and refereed papers that appear in the volumes of the International Journal of Digital Curation, in the series of International Digital Curation Con-



ferences organized so far, as well as in the sections of the DCC Curation Reference Manual (Ross and Day 2010; Davidson and Ashley 2012).

Furthermore, as becomes clear from the overlap in research problems addressed, tools (methods, vocabulary, systems) invoked and goals sought, digital curation as presently estab-lished carries with it quite decisively the traditions, research subjects, and objects of enquiry of digital preservation. Indeed, digital preservation has been considered to be the necessary, if not sufficient, condition for achieving the goals of digital curation (Giaretta, 2006). Most of the objectives posed in the seminal Task Force on Archiving of Digital Information report (Garrett & Waters, 1996), and further developed by initiatives such as the NSF Digital Li-brary Initiative, DELOS, ERPANET, and CASPAR (Hedstrom & Ross, 2003; Ross, 2004; Giaretta, 2007) remain central to the digital curation community. The latter appears to include the most active contributors to digital preservation research and practice, mostly from aca-demic departments of computer science, information and archival science, professional spe-cialties of libraries, archives and digital repositories, and disciplines engaging in data-intensive research. Equally, most current mediating tools for digital curation activities – such as repository software, preservation metadata, trusted repository certification, cost models, and information life-cycle conceptualisations – are shared with digital preservation, and are defined within the custodial fold of institutional processes, systems and standards operating under professional stewardship (Dallas 2007a).

The ‘wild frontier’of digital information

The problem of addressing the reality beyond institutional procedures, standards and professional competencies had already been witnessed in the field of archives and records management as early as the last decade of the 20th century, when John McDonald called attention to the challenges of record-keeping in the modern office environment with its unruly practices of filing, document processing and communication, and to the regulating changes introduced by digital technology to these practices. “In many ways”, he asserted, “the modern office environment is not unlike the wild frontier of the last century. Instead of horses and wagons, our organizations have provided us with com-puters and software, telling us to charge off into the great unexplored plains of cyberspace where supposedly we can work more effectively” (McDonald 1995). Margaret Hedstrom, critiqu-ing what she considered as normative and universalist presuppositions of the University of Pittsburgh Functional Requirements for Recordkeeping (Duff 1996) and University of British Columbia InterPA-RES (Duranti and MacNeil 1996) projects, further suggested that “[t]he wild frontier is becoming more civilized and it is also becoming more complex. Rather than seeking the silver bullet […] the record-keeping community needs to refine its solutions so that they meet varied or-ganizational needs and operate compatibly with increasingly complex systems and organiza-tions. Like the taming of the real frontier, record-keeping professionals no longer need to make all of their own tools or grow all their own food.” (Hedstrom 1997).



A phenomenon analogous to the one recounted by MacDonald and Hedstrom with regard to office recordkeeping may be traced in the divide between custodians and users in the domain of digital cura-tion (Buneman 2004). The denigration of the limited diligence or technical know-how of creators and users of information resources in emerging non-custodial digital practices by digital preservation and curation researchers shows clearly how entrenched this divide is. Disdain for vernacular practice is manifest, for example, in the dismissal of writers’ personal archiving practices as a cause of “future mess”, the one-sided warning that “[f]atalistic approaches toward the archiving of digital files are espe-cially dangerous”, and the charge that they are “partly to blame for the lack of great value they assign to their files” and that they demonstrate “basic ignorance” (Becker and Nogues 2012). Similarly, individu-als engaging in personal digital archiving are chastised for losing their files due to a “combination of benign neglect, sporadic backups, and unsystematic file replication” (Marshall et al. 2007). A similar situation is revealed by Terry Cook’s incisive diagnosis of a common attitude among archivists that puts professional norms, standards and practices as the sole arbiter for understanding recordkeeping prac-tice (an “evidence” driven view of records management), thus “excluding vast categories of information resources (and their creators) from archives entirely, an act of professional hubris for deeming them not worthy of meeting our standards” (Cook 2013).

Yet, the relegation of practices of managing information resources “beyond the wild frontier” as in-ferior, or at the very least imperfect, is not shared by all researchers studying curation practices in non-custodial settings. In her study on the creation of digital resources by communities of professional-amateur (pro-am) enthusiasts, Melissa Terras reaches the following conclusion:

[E]phemera and popular culture materials are often better served by the pro-amateur community than memory institutions. The energy and zeal displayed by amateur digi-tizers is worthy of further consideration, as amateur collections often complement ex-isting collections, providing an alternative free discussion space for enthusiasts. The pro-amateur community is much better at interacting with online audiences than memory institutions are. (Terras 2010)

In fact, Terras suggests that, far from being ignorant and sloppy, pro-am digital collectors, aptly identifying themselves as “gardeners”, spend a lot of time updating the online presence of their collec-tion, and effectively engage in a value-adding process of active curation as they add “intuitive metada-ta” to photographic resources. The juxtaposition with the “scan and dump” digitization typical of many projects within the cultural heritage domain, which she identifies, is striking when one witnesses pro-am curators act, in effect, as “citizen archivists” (Cox 2009), often providing access and guidance to professional researchers seeking information about topics or specific items in their collection.

While this argument is framed primarily in the context of institutional policies regarding the poten-tial of pro-am digitization for heritage access and communication, its implications are salient to our understanding of non-institutional curation practices. Hallmarks of pro-am digitization practice in-clude the active and continuous curation of assets so that they remain fit-for-purpose, and its integra-



tion with “exercising the archive” through monitoring of use and provision of access services to inter-ested parties, including professional researchers. Terras’ argument is, in fact, a timely warning on the danger of a potential arrogance of a custodial view of digital information, and an implicit call to seek lessons for better professional norms and procedures in the practices of curation “in the wild”. It is con-sistent with a broader realization of a need to go beyond traditional professional custodial practice as a model, looking for contextually-specific, and diverse knowledges embedded in practice, which may contradict established views of authenticity, evidentiality and preservation underlying standard digital curation theory.

Further substantiation for the diversity and pervasiveness of practices of curation in the digital envi-ronment can be found at the proliferation of digital personal recording devices (Van House and Churchill 2008a) and family digital photography collections (Marshall 2007; Durrant et al. 2009), the emergence of “personal media assemblages” in virtual communities and social media (Good 2013; Zhao and Lindley 2014), the cultural contingency of practices of “life-logging” (Gemmell et al. 2006; Whittaker et al. 2012), and the rise of the phenomenon of the “citizen archivist” (Cox 2009). Far from being subsumed to an instrumental consideration of conditions of custodianship and information management, these practices urge us to take stock explicitly of the cultural logic of selective access, de-cay and forgetting involved in memory work. In the diametrically opposed practices of Snapchat mes-saging, linked to motives of practical obscurity and ephemerality, and personal memory technologies for remembering, as in the preparation of mementos and multimedia biographies by aged people (Crete-Nishihata et al. 2012; Whittaker et al. 2012; Moffatt et al. 2013) and the use cues for memory recall enhancement (Howarth and Hendry 2013), phenomena of distributed appraisal, “exercising the archive”, evidential hierarchy and significant properties may be identified, as well as a discursive struc-ture and interpersonal social performativity which cannot be subsumed in the instrumental logic of fixity, normativity and digital preservation underlying standard approaches to digital curation.

For example, in the case of personal information management it may be argued that there are in-stances when people have demonstrably good reasons why they show neglect for the preservation of their records, however strongly digital curation specialists may disapprove of this. As one interviewee responded to a research study on writers’ archiving practices:

U]ltimately [my] archiving practices are in place (currently) to help foster new work rather than to keep a record of the process of the old work. That is, the process of the old work is only worth keeping (for me) because it might lead to new work at some point, not because it is inherently interesting. (anonymous writer, quoted in Becker and Nogues 2012)

This example calls into consideration the primacy, diversity and legitimacy of the underlying mo-tives that drive curation practices “beyond the wild frontier”. An analogous phenomenon has been ob-served, and aptly theorized, by Harold Garfinkel in his well-known ethnomethodological analysis of the process of creation of case folders in the Outpatient Psychiatric Clinic of the UCLA Medical Cen-ter:



When any case folder was read as an actuarial record its contents fell so short of ade-quacy as to leave us puzzled as to why “poor records” as poor as these should never-theless be so assiduously kept. On the other hand, when folder documents were regard-ed as unformulated terms of a potential therapeutic contract […] the assiduousness with which folders were kept […] began to make sense. (Garfinkel 1967)

Garfinkel illustrates persuasively how outpatient ward case folders can be “good” for their purpose despite the fact that they lack properties of completeness, clarity, and credibility required of actuarial records. This situation is further echoed by Geoffrey Bowker’s study of research records and practices at the Schlumberger oil drilling company. Like corporate communications that seek to minimize the risk of potential future harm from disclosure, he notes, “[…s]cientific texts are written not to rec-ord what actually happened in the laboratory, but to tell the story of an ideal past in which all the protocols were duly followed” (Bowker 2005). In the context of archival science, Yakel also highlights Garfinkel’s observation that medical records are “usually created with specific goals in mind” as part of recording procedures shaped by organizational culture, and his caution that such rec-ords may constitute “rules of reporting conduct” rather than evidence of events themselves (Yakel 1996). Geoffrey Yeo, adopting a more judgment-laden perspective, adds that records are often “distort-ed by organizational and environmental pressures on their creators” (Yeo 2007); similar conclusions are reached by Michael Moss when he seeks to elucidate the reasons for the “informality and circum-scribed nature” of British government recordkeeping practices at the time of the first Iraq war (Moss 2012).

But there is an additional conclusion that may be drawn from Garfinkel’s analysis of outpatient clin-ic case folders. In order to elucidate the “fitness for purpose” of these records – what they are good for, what kinds of interpretation they are amenable to, and the felicity conditions for their subsequent use – Garfinkel had to resort to an analysis not only of data (based on documentary analysis of the case fold-ers), but also of the contextual nexus of activity in which creators of these documents were involved, the typical and normative properties and resources – institutional and professional norms and expecta-tions – as well as the motives, goals and tacit knowledge conditioning the recordkeeping activity. By emphasizing that “the folder contents[,] much less than revealing an order of interaction, pre-suppose an understanding of that order for a correct reading” (Garfinkel 1967) Garfinkel points in fact to the primacy of agency and community of practice in making records and their crea-tion intelligible. His conclusion has clear implications for our understanding of what digital curation entails in practice, when viewed without the corrective lenses of the dominant custo-dial view.

Towards a practice turn

The pursuit of canonization, evident in the standard definitions, converging accounts of curriculum content and dominant research agendas of digital curation discussed above, can be readily understood



in the context of the imperatives of establishing institutional stability, securing the sustainability of re-search funding, and developing a distinct professional graduate specialization “brand” in a highly competitive graduate professional education environment. This approach hinges on developing a sin-gular, cohesive, and covering set of theoretical concepts and propositions, methods and norms, services and tools for digital curation, which could be advanced as a canon for professional education and as a normative universal framework for professional best practice, to govern the institutional stewardship of digital data potentially useful for future use in research and organizational settings. It is driven by ini-tiatives such as the development of a collaborative digital curation reference manual (Ross and Day 2010; Davidson and Ashley 2012) and a standardized digital curation curriculum (Hank et al. 2010; Tibbo and Lee 2010; Gow et al. 2013; Molloy et al. 2014).

Nevertheless, a tension has been evident between a custodial paradigm of digital curation firmly rooted on the normative and instrumental knowledge of the information disciplines, and actual prac-tice involving creators and users of digital information, with their diverse and potentially conflicting needs and priorities. As early as 2007, Yakel had suggested that “[t]he definers of digital curation see curation as an active and potentially interactive process with records creators”, noting also the “emphasis on future use” of curated assets (Yakel 2007). In the work of the Athens-based Digital Curation Unit, researchers also called for an explicit “recognition that actors involved in the cura-tion of digital information include not only custodians of preserved assets (such as librarians or data managers), but also those concerned with the production of knowledge (research communities formed around diverse disciplines) and its public communication and user ex-perience” (Constantopoulos and Dallas 2008). The multiplicity of digital curation stakeholders is also recognized in the approach adopted by the DigCurV project, beaconing the advantages of specializing digital curation education for cultural heritage professionals, initially through three “lenses” addressing the needs of practitioners, managers, and executives (Gow et al. 2013), and, as additional refinements, also of data creators (Moles and Ross 2013), and to address the needs of personal record keeping (Cirinnà et al. 2013), recognizing that the practices and needs of such stakeholders may be inherently different.

A major dimension of differentiation concerns the opposed roles of custodians and users of digital resources. Drawing from C.P. Snow’s classic polemic on the irreconcilable divide between science and the humanities (Snow 1959) and his own extensive research experience on scientific data curation, Pe-ter Buneman, at the time scientific director of the UK’s Digital Curation Centre, had summarized the differences between these “two cultures of digital curation” as follows:

An archivist (A) does the digital equivalent of putting documents in boxes. [He] is con-cerned with: appraisal - the selection of what documents to preserve, indexing and clas-sification - the choice of which document to put into which box, and preservation - en-suring that the documents are preserved for posterity. […] A scientist (B) does the digi-tal equivalent of publishing a textbook or compendium. [Her] concerns are with organ-ization and integration of data that has been collected from other sources, with the pro-



cess of annotation of this data and with the publishing and presentation of the data. (Buneman 2004)

In fact, it may be argued that the underlying motives of these “two cultures” are quite dif-ferent: archivists (or “preservers”) are concerned with ensuring long-term preservation and providing simple access to digital information, while scientists (“publishers”) are more con-cerned in visualization, annotation and contextualisation of data and relevant argumentation. In the realm of biomedical research, in which Buneman’s argument is situated, biocurators work on the appraisal, study, annotation, contextualization within the findings of prior literature, scien-tific interpretation, and impact evaluation of specific instances of one or two genes or pro-teins per year. They are effectively the curators of the information structures they themselves create, and curation underscores their “power to choose the materials to be revealed to other scientists and those to be hidden”, in contestation and continuous negotiation with post-doctoral students, scientists, upper and middle managers, involving considerations of profita-bility, market direction and intellectual property, vs. clinical and humanitarian motives (Kaptelinin and Nardi 2007). As may be concluded, the appraisal, resource allocation, and actu-al curation of genes and proteins involves not just researchers, but also a variety of other ac-tors, including managers; it is based not just on experimental data, but also on domain knowledge, and on technical, scientific, and economic considerations. It has pragmatic impli-cations for stakeholders and for the future evolution of the system of curating resources in the biomedical realm (Dallas 2007a).

Biocuration is indeed one notable case of curation practice that sits uncomfortably with the norma-tive approach adopted by many information professionals, including archivists and digital curation specialists. The same is true of the proliferation of personal and community memory practices in the digital realm. These practices are strikingly heterogeneous, engage diverse categories of stakeholders with varied needs and motives, occur in different situations, and elide regular categorization. While cultural practices of memory, forgetting and the material and discursive presentation of self (McKem-mish 1996) may not be unrelated to earlier forms of personal recordkeeping, they are shaped different-ly in the context of the proliferation of digital infrastructures and mediating tools such as virtual com-munities, online information services, and digital personal information devices, attracting significant interest among scholars engaged with questions of information management and use, archiving, and human-computer interaction (Marshall 2008a; Van House and Churchill 2008b; Marshall 2008b; Lee 2011; Whittaker 2011; van den Hoven et al. 2012).

The local, context-dependent character of digital curation as practiced in different disciplinary and professional domains is the focus of a further tension with the universal “one size fits all” approach. As early as 2005, and in tandem with the drive towards universal canonization of digital curation, the UK’s Digital Curation Centre had pledged to seek also to understand the differences between scientific disciplines in “deposit arrangements and requirements; preservation arrangements; in the use of data and information; observational versus experimental data, and external sources; organ-



isational and institutional; research process and methods; and different levels of workforce skills” (DCC et al., 2005, 14-15). From 2007 to 2010, Liz Lyon and her co-investigators in the SCARP project researched digital curation in the distinct fields of neuroimaging, atmospheric data re-search, telehealth, genomics, human interaction research, architectural practice, and engineering, and found notable differences among the digital data management practices and attitudes of workers in these fields (Lyon et al. 2010). Attending to the diverse digital curation priorities and practices of re-searchers in different disciplines, of custodians of heterogeneous digital resources, and of a wide range of other stakeholders, calls for a fundamental re-examination of the nature, scope and actors of digital curation.

Drawing from Brien Brothman’s characterization of recordkeeping models expressed in the formal visual language of engineering diagrams as scientistic and conservative, Fiorella Foscarini and her co-workers consider that initiatives such as the OAIS and Interpares digital preservation models and the DCC Curation Lifecycle Model are incapable of capturing the “messy and difficult factors that people bring to the mix” of practice, and unduly privilege normative over descriptive aspects of information cultures (Brothman 2011; Foscarini et al. 2013). The multiyear program of empirical research of schol-arly curation practices of the Greek DCU is based on a similar concern to account adequately for non-normative aspects of digital curation, and their articulation with disciplinary and professional methods and norms. However, while sharing Foscarini and co-workers’ critique of earlier models, DCU identi-fied ontological modeling as a central part of its research agenda, considering it a necessary step to-wards theorizing digital curation, especially in the light of its perceived messiness, diversity and com-plexity. Its Digital Curation Process Model sought to address explicitly the multiplicity of actors of digi-tal curation including, notably, creators and users of digital resources, as well as “the need to under-stand, and account for, differences in digital curation needs between diverse scientific and scholarly disciplines and contexts of use”, beyond the custodial lifecycle (Constantopoulos and Dallas 2008). The complementary DCU Scholarly Research Activity Model, inspired by cultural-historical activity theory, provides for a formal differentiation between curation activities occurring in actual information work by scholars and the procedures, norms and rules that apply to such work, thus explicitly accounting for the (descriptive / prescriptive) duality of practice (Benardou et al. 2010a; Benardou et al. 2010b; Benar-dou et al. 2013).

This approach seeks to go beyond differences in digital data management explored by the SCARP project. Further to the lifecycle and transversal processes contained in the widely accepted DCC Cura-tion Lifecycle Model (Higgins 2008), the DCU Digital Curation Process Model proposes the explicit registration of the user experience, and introduces broader definitions of knowledge enhancement to include semantic annotation and application of rules and ontologies, and of presentation to account for the generation of “new genres of artefacts (scientific, scholarly, artistic, etc.) from existing primary or secondary digital resources, dependent on functional context and producing [new] resources” (Constantopoulos and Dallas 2008). A further initiative seeks to extend the bounds of the original DCC curation lifecycle by way of proposing a merged DCC&U model (Constantopoulos et al. 2009).



Other recent models of digital curation process, such as the Metadata Curation Model (Shaon and Woolf 2008) and the more recent Stories and Stewardship model (Kunda and Anderson-Wilk 2011) also go purposefully, and decisively, beyond digital preservation, shifting the emphasis from the fixity of static information objects to the dynamics of knowledge and meaning production and negotiation engaging multiple stakeholders in diverse contexts.

In seeking to identify what should be entailed by adequate knowledge representation of digital re-sources in the context of digital curation, as early as 2007 we had argued that such representation is manifested not only in “patterns of information use and services, but also in the methods, mid-dle range theories, rhetorical and argumentation structure constituting [the] body of knowledge” of particular epistemic domains. On this basis, we framed particular aspects of ar-chaeological fieldwork, museum based research, and the construction of meaning in the museum visit experience as curation practices, and advocated an approach to the “knowledge curation” of cultural heritage that prioritizes the agency of epistemic actors such as field archaeologists, curators of museum collections, and visitors (Dallas 2007a). Also in juxtaposition with the dominant view of digital cura-tion as mere data stewardship, Yakel and her co-workers in the Polar Bear Expedition project team pointed out that “facilitating reuse of digital objects[… is] the least explored [aspect of digital curation, one that …] relates more to the definition of a curator in the museum sense; that is, a person who interprets and contextualizes objects for the public” (Yakel et al. 2007).

This process of contextualization as curation is nowhere more apparent than in the construction of museum displays conceived as spatializations of knowledge (Hooper-Greenhill 1992) based on the “the mapping of conceptual relationships underlying the intrinsic and extrinsic properties of artefacts (e.g., a typological order, a historic sequence) onto exhibit arrangements in gallery space”, which persists in the digital domain through virtual exhibition (Dallas 2007b). In the digital domain, exhibitions as manifestations of “inscribing memory” may be complemented by active processes of “incorporating memory” (Connerton 1989; Rowlands 1993), manifested through social tagging, annotation, remix, co-curation, etc., processes that are performative, unstable and impossible to address. User-centred digital cultural practices such as these raise additional issues for digital curation, which are, also, to be found in curating digitally varia-ble, procedural and performance-based contemporary art, calling for an approach based on accounting for continuous change and enrichment rather than on preserving fixity (Depocas et al. 2003; Rinehart and Ippolito 2014). And, as suggested by Christoph Becker and his co-investigators, seeking to ensure that the “intentions [of interactive multimedia artists] are communicated through a probably transformed representation of their artworks”, artists themselves should be fully involved in the process of defining digital curation requirements (Becker et al. 2007).

In a similar vein, based on a grounded theory analysis of the creative process of music composi-tion, Guillaume Boutard and his co-workers (Boutard et al. 2013) introduced a practice-laden frame-work for the digital curation of artistic works with interactive components that can ensure their future



intelligibility, or epistemic adequacy. To account for the variable knowledge flows and knowledge range emerging from actual practice and manifested in recorded information, they advanced the notion of “significant knowledge”, expanding the familiar concept of significant properties (Hedstrom and Lee 2002) established in the context of the OAIS standard model for digital preservation. Echoing the in-clusion of domain-specific modelling as a dimension of the DCU Curation Process Model, Boutard and co-workers propose a comprehensive model for capturing the significant knowledge in music composition, based on a classification scheme composed by organological specifications, knowledge lifecycle, production process lifecycle, and electroacoustic composition processes. Like in the case of the DCU, Stories and Stewardship, and Metadata Curation models, their framework signals a notewor-thy shift towards an event-centric, agency-oriented approach to digital curation, putting practice, ac-tors and context in the centre.

A pragmatic approach to digital curation

In introducing the metaphor of the wild frontier, McDonald’s chief concern was to address the chal-lenge of a deluge of digital information which, if left unchecked, would compromise the ability of or-ganizations to manage information effectively (McDonald 1995). While Hedstrom does suggest, more explicitly, that recordkeeping professionals need to attend to the diversity of needs and the contingen-cies of the internal and external environment of organizations, she still employs the same metaphor of the wild frontier (Hedstrom 1997). The call of these authors for the information professions to cross the wild frontier and look beyond the custodial fold has been increasingly answered in the practice of the information professions. User studies are now ubiquitous, as witnessed by the expansion of the burgeoning field of “information seeking, behaviour and use” to cover all aspects of information prac-tice (Case 2012), including archives (Duff and Johnson 2002; Duff et al. 2004), digital museums (Skov 2009), professional education in a book studies program (Duff et al. 2012), and archaeological field research (Huvila 2008a). Such research initiatives have contributed to the emergence of new important understandings of the situatedness, historicity and social contingency of dealing with recorded infor-mation. But the metaphor of the frontier adopted by McDonald and Hedstrom, and the fashioning of information work (and, by extension, digital curation) in terms of the relationship between “settlers” and “aboriginals”, with its underlying premise of acculturation, entails an ethically troubling asymmetry which cannot possibly hold in the realm of cultural practice, which is inherently historical, thus moti-vated by discursive formations, and pragmatic, thus driven by considerations of human agency.

The notion of the “contact zone” has been advanced as a more suitable alternative to that of the wild frontier. Introduced originally in the context of education by Mary Louise Pratt, the contact zone was later adopted by James Clifford in the context of anthropological museum collections as a culturally more respectful and appropriate model to govern the relationship between museum curators on the one hand, and members of indigenous communities on the other (Pratt 1991; Clifford 1997). Drawing from a consultation session between curators and elders in the UBC Museum of Anthropology, as well



as from the “The Spirit Sings” and “Into the Heart of Africa” exhibition controversies, Clifford called attention to the alternative forms of knowledge and priorities of indigenous actors with regard to the significant properties of particular artefacts, and to the multiple contestations, debates and negotiations between different communities, based on their diverse practices, knowledges, and interests. While adopting the rhetoric of the contact zone was later criticized as an inadequate attempt to overcome the entrenched asymmetry between museums and indigenous communities, it is still accepted by critics as “an important feature of the empowerment of communities whose patrimony museums hold” (Boast 2011), and one that could lead to a reconfiguration of memory and meaning making practices in digi-tal heritage (Gere 1997; Srinivasan et al. 2010).

The approach to digital curation advocated here has been inspired by McDonald and Hedstrom’s call for attention to practice across the wild frontier, but adopts Clifford’s call to suggest that digital cu-ration should be considered, instead, as a contact zone (Clifford 1997). Digital curation research, in that context, should focus on the study of actual practices of curation in a diversity of contexts and on associated actors, objects, processes and infrastructures, and should prioritize such intellectual inquiry over the imposition of models developed within the custodial fold. Anne Gilliland (2010) had also ar-gued that that it is now time to re-examine the complexity of the relationship between normative and actual dimensions of digital curation activity, and the underlying technical and organizational entan-glements introduced by digital infrastructures. This endeavour should not only be seen as essential for the redefinition of digital recordkeeping in the post-custodial environment at a time when, as Gilliland argues, “the construction of cyber-infrastructure and the associated rise of digital curation [is] a major preoccupation of information and heritage professionals” (Gilliland 2010), but also as a sine-qua-non condition for the definition of digital curation as a cohesive domain of intellectual in-quiry.

Such a re-examination touches upon all aspects of digital curation, expanding significantly the scope of particular questions regarding by whom it is performed, what is (to be) curated, where, when, how and for what purpose curation takes place. In a pragmatic approach, actors of digital curation in-clude not just information professionals but also those involved in all aspects of the creation and reuse of a broad range of information objects. The latter comprise not just digital research data, static digital resources, and databases, but also derivations and performances of such objects, and representations of domain knowledge, including indigenous and community-based. Digital curation is also deemed to occur, apart from trusted repositories and other custodial environments, in the pervasive and diverse digital environments represented by the Web, cloud technologies, personal information devices and networked services, and to span not just the curation lifecycle of resources within custodial systems but the extended, multiple contexts in which information is identified, captured, appraised, encoded, de-scribed, annotated, enriched, shared, and, more generally, created, curated, and used.

Privileging the multiplicity of contexts, processes, and actors of digital curation practice, its actuali-ty, contingency, pervasiveness, end-to-end applicability beyond the lifecycle, reach beyond the custodi-al fold, and pragmatic and epistemic entailments, resonates with records continuum thinking (Upward



1996; McKemmish 2001). Inspired by the simplicity and power of Lithuanian mathematician Her-mann Minkowski’s notion of the spacetime continuum, building on 1950s Australian national archivist Ian McLean’s focus on the continuity between archives and records management (McKemmish and Piggott 1994), and drawing from sociologist Anthony Giddens’ structuration theory (Giddens 1984), the records continuum approach broadens the scope of recordkeeping from the moment of creation of a record to that of its plural interpretations, recognizing the perspectival concerns of multiple stake-holders beyond archivists and data managers (McKemmish 2007), and addressing the ethical and po-litical challenges posed by decolonial and indigenous modes of knowing, and by online communica-tion and social media (Upward et al. 2011). The records continuum model developed by Frank Upward seeks to build a framework for a unified discipline of recordkeeping in the digital environment, based on the schematic representation of cascading relations alongside axes of transactionality, identity, evi-dentiality and recordkeeping (Upward 1996). However, the general structure of the model, consisting of four complementary dimensions of creating, capturing, organizing and pluralizing processes, lends itself to the formal representation of diverse domains, such as information, information systems, and publishing (Upward 2000), and, further, to be a foundation for “recordkeeping informatics”, a unified disciplinary base from which to address the challenges of digitally recorded information (Upward et al. 2013).

The applicability of a continuum approach to the challenges of digital curation is demonstrated by emerging digital practices in the field of archaeology, in the context of a growing archaeological cura-tion crisis (Bawaya 2007) characterized by the proliferation of poorly documented, fragmented and diffused archaeological archives (Voss 2012), the rise of social media in archaeological recording and communication (Kansa et al. 2011), and pervasive information practices by “multiple stakeholders, contestations and negotiations spanning from commercial archaeology to community engagement” (Dallas 2015). The use of a diversity of digital tools and approaches in Çatalhöyük, a well-resourced, multiyear, multi-team fieldwork project with an explicit commitment to principles of interpretation “at the trowel’s edge”, epistemological reflexivity and pluralization of archaeological knowledge, aptly demonstrates how the archaeological record is actively constructed through end-to-end digital cura-tion activity “from the field to the screen”:

While the availability of multimodal, interactive, real time recording, and documentation tech-nologies in the field moves interpretation upstream to the very moment of digging and in situ recording, conversely, the availability of the excavation archive through the active research pro-cess (which, in archaeology, can be prolonged for many years of continuous effort) in a hyper-linked database, and multiple digital publication genres, combining also interpretive narratives, 3D models, mapping, and video documentation, extends the process of recording and docu-mentation downstream. […U]pstreaming the act of interpretation “at the trowel’s edge” […] suggests that the initial construction of the archaeological record during excavation is actually inseparable from curation. And, downstreaming the process of description and representation



[…] means that the entire practice of creating, managing and using the archaeological record is permeated, again, by a kind of curation that spans the continuum of the archaeological research process. (Dallas 2015).

Processes relevant to digital curation practices such as these need to be conceived more broadly than in a custodial approach, to encompass diverse aspects of knowledge representation, user agency, and domain modelling in the continuum. In tandem with notions of preserving authenticity and en-suring future “fitness for purpose” through professional stewardship, a pragmatic approach to digital curation hinges thus on the possibility of pluralizing through a strategy of active use, or “exercising the archive”, acknowledging and supporting the pervasive nature of digital curation. Rather than seeking to tame the “wild frontier” of curation practices outside the custodial fold, it strives to meet such practices on an equal basis at the “contact zone” (Table 2).

The pragmatic approach to digital curation advocated here is motivated by a double imperative: it aims both to represent digital curation in its actuality in attested practice, and to intervene in ways that encourage appropriate approaches as part of institutional and professional work. It seeks to address the increasingly mainstreamed, pervasive, and invisible digital infrastructures that condition the broad range of actual curation practices attested “in the wild”, and to account for the impact of doing curation digitally (from appraisal and classification to representation and interpretation) on meaning-making, cultural appropriation and negotiation of power relationships. It calls for the adoption of multidiscipli-nary, medium term research which might contribute, at the same time, to a scholarship of discovery, with regard to diverse curation practices, from humanities scholarship to personal and community memory, both in institutional contexts and “in the wild”, a scholarship of integration, drawing from the intellectual traditions of critical museology, postcustodial archival science, sociotechnical infrastruc-ture studies, and digital heritage, and, a scholarship of application in the field of cultural heritage doc-umentation, digital repositories, information integration, curation-enabled aggregators, and semantic enrichment services (cf. Boyer 1990).

Major challenges need to be met on adoption of such a pragmatic approach. Firstly, there is a press-ing need to develop a coherent, relevant and actionable overarching conceptualization of digital cura-tion as an epistemic-pragmatic activity which would account for the breadth and diversity of curation practices outlined above, would be amenable to operationalization, and would allow the elicitation of useful inferences. Adopting an approach to digital curation that prioritizes human agency, pragmatics, historicity and sociotechnical contingency calls for attention to its formal structure as purposeful activ-ity (Dallas 2007a). Ignoring the poietic nature of curation practice, the double dependency of curation methods and procedures on shared norms of actors and properties of mediating tools, and the process-es of curating categorical domain knowledge beyond particulars in such formal conceptualizations can have pragmatic and ethical consequences, given their impact on how digital curation is understood and what kinds of digital curation activity is privileged by such an understanding.



Thus, the specifics of particular formal conceptual representations of digital curation matter. While sharing properties with common process ontologies (Malone et al. 2003), the DCU curation process model demonstrates: a) a clear differentiation between prescriptive and descriptive aspects of curation activity, to account for how it can deviate from, and even challenge, established norms, procedures, or methods of curation; b) an ability to capture motives and goals of curation actors, thus setting curation activity in relation to their multiple intentionalities; c) a definition of methods and procedures by virtue of their adoption by a community or field, and also of their application through tools and services, in acknowledgement of their sociotechnical character; d) an extension of the scope of curation activity to include concepts and propositions indexed by information objects; and e) a specialization of curation relationships representing the activity of curating information objects (e.g., refers to, creates, updates, annotates, classifies, aggregates, samples, modifies, etc.) and concepts or propositions (e.g., refers to, represents, posits, supports, rebuts, undermines, expands, specializes, etc.) (Constantopoulos and Dal-las 2008). Inspired by cultural-historical activity theory and compatible with the widely-accepted CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model for cultural information (Crofts et al. 2010), this model is a promising foundation to develop an adequate conceptualization of digital curation as an epistemic-pragmatic activity. Ongoing work on the NeDiMAH methods ontology (NeMO), a formal semantic specification of digital research methods in the arts and humanities, builds upon this foundation (Hughes et al. forthcoming).

Secondly, our approach calls for attention to the knowledge representation of cultural things as ob-jects of curation. Recognizing that digital curation concerns not merely information resources qua digital objects, but also their epistemic content and context, an appropriate approach might make use of event-centric ontological representations of information objects and of their pragmatic referents “in the world” – the people, places, events, social practices, norms and cultural forms these objects index – and the changes to the epistemic content and context of such objects as domain knowledge evolves, and as objects become semantically enriched while multiple interpretive communities “exercise the archive”. Accounting for cultural heritage objects indexed by digital information involves representing their provenance, historical function and significance in the past, as well as their cultural biography and pragmatic efficacy in the present – for example, when they are framed as works of art, or placed in the context of contemporary cultural contestation. It also involves representing the epistemic objects – descriptions, reports, classifications, digital reproductions and visualisations – through which these become objects of knowledge (Dallas 2007a). The experience of mapping and semantic enrichment of archaeological metadata for the purpose of harvesting by the Europeana search engine and portal on European cultural heritage (Purday 2009) further highlights questions of knowledge representation of digital information objects depicting cultural heritage assets (Charles et al. 2013; Gavrilis et al. 2014). To be able to add value to a trusted body of digital information, it may therefore be argued that a pro-fessional practice of digital curation ought to account not only for “the active management and ap-praisal of data over the life-cycle” (Pennock 2007), but also for “the active ‘questioning’, dynamic co-



evolution and adequate representation of its epistemic/pragmatic content and context” as it is trans-formed and enriched through scholarship and cultural practice (Dallas 2007a).

Thirdly, a pragmatic approach entails far closer attention to understanding curation practices and methods through evidence-based inquiry on how curatorial processes are enacted in diverse contexts, such as scholarly work and cultural memory. Such inquiry has pragmatic import on the technological landscape of digital curation. To ensure the validity of requirements for emerging digital research infra-structures, it is essential to study both the emergent, descriptive dimension of curation practice mani-fested in how scholars work with information, and its normative dimension manifested in the shared norms, procedures and methods of humanities research (Dallas et al. 2014). An analysis of interviews in the context of the European Digital Research Infrastructure in the Arts and Humanities (DARIAH) indicates how scholars routinely engage in the active curation of data and scholarly objects, transform-ing “raw” into “institutional” facts (Searle 2006) through annotation and edition, scholarly writing and publication (Benardou et al. 2010b). In a follow up study in the context of the European Holocaust Re-search Infrastructure (EHRI), researchers were found to engage in diverse curation micro-activities such as annotating, organising, and versioning (Benardou et al. 2013), through which they were seen to modify, create or destroy instances of all kinds of information objects related to their inquiry: concep-tual representations not just of objects encountered, but also, in tandem, of activities, actors, concepts, and other related entities. As in the case of museum collections work (Trant 2007), a process of knowledge curation is manifested here, situated not just in objects mediated through their digital sur-rogates, but also in a network of heterogeneous information-laden entities from the world of events, properties and kinds which they index.

Yet, digital curation now takes place increasingly “in the wild”, enacted in the context of personal and community memory, using social and participatory media, and situated outside the custodial framework of institutional digital infrastructures. Contextual and reflexive approaches to the curation of the archaeological record are characterized by upstreaming the process of interpretation up to the point of origin – “at the trowel’s edge” (Hodder 1997; Berggren et al. 2015) – and downstreaming de-scription and representation up to the point of publication, i.e., overlapping the processes of capturing, description, representation, visualisation, analysis, and interpretation, thus completely messing up the notion of a neatly structured curation lifecycle (Dallas 2015) and pointing at the relevance of continu-um thinking (Upward 1996; McKemmish 2001). Practices such as curatorial work in museums, visitor presence, co-construction of meaning, and interaction with virtual exhibitions (Dallas 2007c; Dallas 2007a) are ripe with forms of curation that draw their efficacy from notions of cultural biography, dis-cursive structure and object performativity, standing in dissonance with custodial approaches to digital curation. The proliferation of new memory practices based on personal information management sys-tems, digital media in the home, “personal media assemblages” in virtual communities, and life-logging devices (Van House and Churchill 2008a; Durrant et al. 2009; Whittaker 2011; Zhao and Lind-ley 2014) produces regimes of active curation which cannot be subsumed by an instrumental consider-ation of conditions of custodianship and information management. These new phenomena may be



fruitfully situated in the context of a growing body of literature on participatory and indigenous cura-tion, which recognizes the sociality and primacy of cultural practice over institutional arrangements imported from professional disciplines, however benign the latter may be (Huvila 2008b; Kreps 2010; Boast 2011). Further work is needed in this area, in the context of a definition of digital curation (and its concepts, methods and instruments) as an end-to-end, pervasive activity “in the wild”, in the light of an emerging continuum of digital media, and based on the growing importance of networked digital infrastructures for cultural knowledge and memory practices.

Fourthly, and finally, to serve the imperative of intervening, a pragmatic approach to digital cura-tion needs to attend to the specification, design and deployment of curation-enabled sociotechnical infrastructures that are capable of serving the diverse and pervasive practices of curation not just in custodial environments, but also “in the wild”. The affordances of digital tools and services – databases, repositories, digital libraries, multimedia platforms, mobile devices, digital capture equipment, etc. – have a major effect on enabling and constraining curation activity – in a process of “infrastructural inversion”, as Geoffrey Bowker called this phenomenon with regard to the research practices of scien-tists working for the Schlumberger oil drilling company (Bowker 1994). These digital tools and ser-vices act in tandem with procedures, methods and normative arrangements that co-determine prac-tice, as part of sociotechnical infrastructures whose full semantics cannot be subsumed in their formal description, as it also entails tacit understandings that are introduced, tweaked and shared by specific communities of practice. The problem often encountered is that digital infrastructures introduced to cultural heritage are often selected on the basis of considerations of technology rather than practice, in a form of “technological isomorphism” (cf. DiMaggio and Powell 1983) which negates their contextual specificity.

To ensure that systems match requirements, it is necessary to engage with the specification, design and deployment of community-driven digital infrastructures which explicitly focus on the provision of curation capabilities, as is the case with the Metadata and Object Repository (MORe 2.0) deployed by the Greek Digital Curation Unit to support the dynamic evolution and continuous semantic enrich-ment of heterogeneous metadata and registry descriptions. MORe 2.0, developed and trialled exten-sively in the context of the cultural heritage community-based Connecting Archaeology and Architec-ture with Europeana (CARARE) and Local Institutions in an Europeana Cloud (LoCloud) projects, employs an OAIS-compliant repository engine and a modular services architecture to support the planning and deployment of a combination of semi-automated and manual digital curation activities by diverse curation actors (Gavrilis et al. 2013; Gavrilis et al. 2014).

While the MORe 2.0 system has been used already to enable curation of digital cultural resources “in the wild”, such as Wikimedia assets and Flickr images with their associated metadata, to embrace fully the pervasiveness of curation practice it may be necessary to go beyond centralized systems to support “curation at the source” or “sheer curation” (Miles 2007; Curry et al. 2010), allowing curation processes to be performed at the moment of data creation or capture. Conversely, and in line with a continuum approach, it should be possible to support the transfer of dynamically curated versions of



aggregated information objects back to their original creators while preserving their curation context and semantics. An overarching plan for a pervasive curation infrastructure might entail a combination of distributed cloud storage, curation-enabled information systems, and orchestrated services accessi-ble to the native interface of end-user tools and applications in the continuum. Such a plan may also leverage the deployment of intelligent, self-documenting, dynamically evolving curation objects, build-ing on Seamus Ross’ yet unrealized vision of “harbour-seeking” objects able to navigate to a safe envi-ronment ensuring their own long term digital preservation (Ross 2007).

Our overarching advocacy of a pragmatic approach to digital curation generalizes the syllogisms advanced by McDonald and Hedstrom regarding organizational records management, applying them to the pervasive domain of curation practices in the digital environment. It makes a plea for the aban-donment of the metaphor of the wild frontier and for the explicit adoption of the notion of digital cura-tion as contact zone, based on a position of epistemic humility vis-à-vis the grounded practice of digital curation “in the wild”. In fact, as Lee and Tibbo acknowledge, “[a] great deal of digital curation ac-tivity takes place outside the context of the “archival enterprise” (Lee and Tibbo 2011), and it has been our intent to refocus attention from the custodial realm dominating the concepts, research agen-das and professional specialization of digital curation to such activity. Due to the rising ubiquity of digi-tal infrastructures, these practices are now situated in contexts as diverse as archaeological fieldwork and knowledge creation, ethnographic action research, personal and community memory, and the broad spectrum of vernacular, subaltern and indigenous cultures constituting our social reality.

The account of the genealogy of curation presented above reveals the epistemic, meaning-making lineage of curatorial work in the field of museums, from which it grew. An examination of curation practice “in the wild” yields a rich landscape of active, pluralizing knowledge construction, dependent on the adoption of particular methods and mediating tools, and governed by the motives and goals of diverse curation actors. Developing a pragmatic approach to digital curation through a a combination of domain and object modelling, research on practices, and infrastructures specification and design work, should be able to address fully the diversity and pervasiveness of these practices, the heterogenei-ty of information objects that comprise the ‘information worlds’ of social actors involved in their crea-tion, curation and use, and the purposefulness, agency, and relative indeterminacy, of goals and mo-tives of digital curatorial activity which they bring forth. It should thus be able to provide a better alter-native to current, custodial approaches to digital curation which, as demonstrated, are incapable of cap-turing and serving the diversity and pervasiveness of emerging curation practices in the digital envi-ronment.

Conclusion

In this paper, we examined the core properties and entailments of a dominant, custodial view on digital curation, underlying the definitions advanced by leading centres and scholars in the field, and its re-search agendas and practices. We demonstrated that the term is used predominantly to brand a profes-



sional field of practice which seeks to develop a normative, prescriptive set of rules, established proce-dures, systems etc. in order to serve the future fitness for purpose of digital data objects through digital preservation. We argued that some of the assumptions of the dominant view – the continuing rele-vance of a custodial model that assumes that important data will always be migrated to curated reposi-tories, the enforcement of imperatives of long term preservation, stewardship as the sole objective of curation, all in all, the definition of curation in the instrumental context of data management – are not warranted if examined in the light of a historical genealogy of curation practices in the field of muse-ums and cultural heritage, and of emerging contemporary practices of curation in the digital realm. We pointed at the diversity and pervasiveness of digital curation practices “in the wild”, and demonstrated the inability of the standard approach, and its dependence on a “wild frontier” ideology, to act as a framework for understanding the social performativity and human agency underlying these practices. We also showed that the mainstream approach is in dissonance with contemporary thinking in the field of critical museology and postcustodial archival science, which increasingly problematizes the neutrality, and authority, of professional curators and archivists in the context of subaltern, indigenous and community voices.

To overcome these problems, we side with a growing chorus of critical voices and argue, further, for the adoption of a radical alternative: what may be called a pragmatic theorization of digital curation. The established custodial approach articulates the relationship between digital curation professionals and systems on the one hand, and primary actors on the other, as based on service provision and on changing user attitudes to conform to a universal set of criteria and principles regarding information preservation, stability, and sharing. The alternative, pragmatic approach advocated here views digital curation as a pervasive practice, which transcends the continuum of diverse contexts of interaction between human actors and recorded information. In line with contemporary thinking in the cultural heritage field, it regards such interaction as epistemic, i.e. as constitutive of knowledge, recognizing that knowledge constitution takes place in diverse contexts with differing norms, rules and regularities. It therefore adopts a descriptive, rather than prescriptive, stance with regard to its scope of inquiry, and seeks to account for the actual and real in digital curation, addressing its underlying motives, goals and contexts. Consequently, it calls for the adoption of a program that brings together knowledge represen-tation, curation practices, and digital infrastructures research, and aims at the double objective of rep-resenting and intervening.

While acknowledging the importance of the purposive, normative, professional interventions that take the form of identifying best practices, specifying and developing new digital infrastructures, de-bating and agreeing on procedures, criteria and standards, and charting out competencies, learning objectives and curricula, our approach calls for a broader inquiry and theorization based on an en-counter with the diverse field of curatorial practices, knowledge regimes and communities of agency operating “in the wild”. It thus seeks to liberate digital curation from the instrumental prerogative in which it is currently imprisoned – the rhetoric of funding applications, the persuasive language to at-



tract graduate students, the marketing talk of procurers of systems and consultants to potential cus-tomers – and establish it as a field of intellectual inquiry in its own right.

Acknowledgments

The author wishes to thank Panos Constantopoulos and his colleagues at the Digital Curation Unit, IMIS-Athena Research Centre for fruitful collaboration, exchanges and insights, as well as to Seamus Ross and the anonymous reviewers for valuable comments. This work was partially supported by the eCloud – Europeana Cloud: unlocking Europe’s research via the Cloud, (Grant Agreement No. 325091) and LoCloud – Local content in an Europeana Cloud (Grant Agreement No. 325099) projects of the ICT Policy Support Programme, as well as by the ARIADNE - Advanced Research Infrastructure for Archaeological Dataset Networking in Europe (Grant Agreement No. 313193) project of the SP4-Capacities e-Infrastructures Programme of the European Commission.

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Digital Curation beyond the 'Wild Frontier': a Pragmatic Approach

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