Putting Museums in the Data Curation Picture

Abstract

For the past several decades, museums worldwide have recognized the need to digitize their collection records and images. The global reach of the web has increased the urgency of this work in order to make museum collections and information accessible to online users. Museums in Europe and North America are now routinely digitizing all collection objects as they are acquired and loaned, not only for access purposes but also as documentation in the event of loss, damage, or theft of the physical originals. Increasingly, museums are also acquiring born-digital content such as digital media art, historical data in digital formats, and scientific research data. The creation and acquisition of digital assets is expanding at a rapid pace, and museums now have a critical need for professionals in the field who know how to manage and preserve digital assets and who will participate in the development of standards and policies for the creation, management, preservation, exchange, and use of digital data. The establishment of the Digital Curation Centre in the UK in 2004 and the publication of government reports in the US and Europe calling for the preservation of scientific data (National Science Board 2004; Blue Ribbon Task Force 2008, 2010; High Level Expert Group 2010) has spurred the growth of digital curation. In the US, these developments fortuitously coincided with the creation of a new federal funding program to increase the number of graduates from library and information science (LIS) master's and doctoral programs, and which has supported the development and integration of digital curation into LIS education (Manjarraz et al. 2010). © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2014.