A Multiple Perspective Account of Digital Curation for Cultural Heritage: Tasks, Disciplines and Institutions

Abstract

Cultural heritage management is a multiple-perspective enterprise where several disciplines and practices contribute to successful dissemination and communication. Digital data in support of cultural heritage management are addressed by the digital curation process, which has been emerging to account for the diversity of disciplinary communities and cultural heritage organizations. Digital curation addresses the diversity of participating skills and practices by working on the relationship between the cultural heritage objects and their digital counterparts. In particular, the innumerable initiatives for providing access to cultural heritage data are ideally coordinated by digital curation and are part of the process since the beginning. However, some thorough reflections on its role and implementation in cultural heritage institutions yet lack. In this paper, we provide a survey of the digital curation process, by unpacking the component curatorial tasks, with the solutions that have been proposed in the literature and in the application projects to account for the multiple perspectives at hand.