Published on February 29th, 2016 | by Guest

The Process of Digital Curation – Infographic

The sheer volume of digital content and data which gets uploaded to the internet every day is almost impossible to comprehend, especially when you consider the task of storing and curating it all.

Many billions of bytes flow through cyberspace. To give you some idea of the scale of it all, Facebook users share 2 million pieces of content every minute and 72-hours’ worth of video content is uploaded to YouTube every 60 seconds.

Sifting through this sea of digital content must feel like swimming against the tide, but amongst this endless flow, there are pearls of wisdom and information that has the potential to grow our collective knowledge base.

This is where digital curation takes center stage. As this infographic by USC Online Library Science Degree about the process of digital curation illustrates, the collection, maintenance and archiving of certain digital assets is seen as an arduous but important task.

Over the last decade or so, digital curation has picked up pace. We are already now at a point where the vast majority of the knowledge base and intellectual assets of institutions are kept in digital form.

Rapid improvements in data storage technologies continue to aid the ability to store huge amounts of digital content and on the current evidence of the flow of data being uploaded, those improvements will have to keep on coming, in order to cope with the volumes.

We are now well and truly in the digital age and if you have trained as an informatician or data librarian for example, it is unlikely that you will be out of work for too long.