Information literacy competencies as part of content curation

Abstract

The meaning of curation has been connected to art and historical museums but, in the web context, it is also connected to information or content that can have many forms such as text, pictures, video, or music. Content curation is not a new phenomenon, although the term has not been used for a long time, and appears more often in short articles or web pages than in research papers. It has links to several professions and information literacy. The purpose of this paper is to study as to what degree the elements of information literacy can be found in the definitions of content or information curation. The study is based on 18 articles and 12 web pages concerning information or content curation. In the results, elements of information literacy, consisting of the information need, searching and finding information, evaluating it, incorporating into one’s knowledge base, and using it ethically and legally are present in the definitions of content curation, although some of them implicitly, and they are described by many different terms. Although the elements of information literacy would be present in the definitions, references to information literacy literature are rare. The definitions also include elements outside the traditional definitions of information literacy. The results imply to the relevance of information literacy skills and importance of information literacy education in many different fields. Information or content curation have been proposed as future career opportunities for information professionals.