Training the Custodians of Ireland’s Digital Heritage
By Amber Cushing & Kalpana Shankar
As individuals, we create digital objects every time we like a Facebook page, write an email, create a Word document or snap a digital photo. Likewise, corporations, cultural heritage institutions, and universities create and manage digital information all the time. But what do they choose what to keep for the long term? And how? Digital curators, data archivists, and digital information managers are trained experts who work in such institutions to help answer these questions.
While the UK, US, Canada, Australia and other countries have more long-standing training programmes, what’s needed has not been as clearly defined in Ireland. In order to develop the best digital curation education possible for Ireland, we needed to analyse digital curation needs in the Irish context. So, we decided to explore digital curation and information management needs in Ireland to inform the development of postgraduate education on the subject. Here, we summarise what what we did and what we found.
Over the course of two years, we collected data via a Web questionnaire from information professionals working on the island of Ireland (the Republic and Northern Ireland) about their uses of and needs for digital curation in their institutions. We then did in-person interviews and then another web questionnaire about continuing professional development (continuing education) needs. In the end, 94 information professionals responded to the first web questionnaire about digital curation needs. We interviewed 9 individuals about their personal experiences with digital curation in the workplace and 164 individuals responded to our second questionnaire about continuing professional development education in digital curation.
Digital Curation: Hiding in Plain Sight?
We were surprised to find that in Ireland, individuals are engaging with digital curation every day and/or report problems where digital curation knowledge and practices could help them, but they reported that digital curation would not be of use to them. Deeper analysis suggested that the disconnect was happening because information professionals just did not know what the term “digital curation” encompassed. We confirmed this with people in the face to face interviews. Those tasked with maintaining digital information were often the only one in their organisation with that job duty. As such, they had difficulty advocating for the necessity of their work as well as terms used to describe that work, such as “digital curation.”
Based on this research, the UCD I-School decided rename its postgraduate degree and develop a new core module based on communicating digital curation to external and internal audiences. Starting in 2018, the MSc in Digital Curation degree will be known as the MSc in Digital Information Management. I have also developed a new module that will focus on outreach and “inreach” for digital curation. In addition, a new Online CPD Professional Certificate in Digital Information Management is planned to launch in August 2018.
In addition to the name change, new module and new online professional certificate, we will continue to do “consciousness raising” in Ireland, to underscore the necessity of maintaining digital data for the long term as well as the social, economic and technical issues associated with digital curation.
If you are interested in the final published article, please contact Dr Amber Cushing (amber.cushing@ucd.ie) or Professor Kalpana Shankar (Kalpana.shankar@ucd.ie) for a copy.
