Comments on: What’s a Content Curator?

By: Brent MacKinnon

Brent MacKinnon — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 12:56:06 +0000

I think Stephen Downes is the closest to an content curator that I know of. I think you have hit the proverbial nail on the head with your premise. Great post, I'll be curating this one for sure.

Brent MacKinnon

By: Mark Moran

Mark Moran — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 17:59:11 +0000

Disobedientlib, we’ve released an alpha version of findingEducation (http://findingeducation.com/), a platform that does much of what you dream of. Librarians and teachers contribute links to a library, with tags & descriptions, and can search other each others’ links, including by name, grade level, and subject. The search is a little clunky at the moment but will be enhanced very shortly. The tool also allows you to use SweetSearch, our Google custom search engine that only searches 35,000 quality URLs, to find good links.

By: Zoo & Conservation News Service: What I’ve Been Up To « Librarian Science

Tue, 06 Oct 2009 16:34:16 +0000

[...] So, when I came across Rohit Bhargava’s concept of a “Content Curator” [via David Lee King], I raised an eyebrow. Both Rohit and David ostentatiously claim that no one is filling this role. [...]

By: Kaitlyn

Kaitlyn — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 21:28:29 +0000

Our library does this for our staff. We spend a good chunk of time trawling the web, in addition to print sources, for information that we abstract, condense, and send directly to staff every week, and we post it on our site (http://library.sandiegozoo.org/news.htm). It makes the library a bit more prominent in the organization, and we can make sure everyone who works here is getting the newest, most relevant info to do their jobs.

By: Gerrit

Gerrit — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 17:08:16 +0000

Graeme Siddle above mentions what I think will define the true Content Curator from an irrelevant Content Distributor/presenter: the ability to preserve content. In the future, curators in libraries (closest similar model today would probably be special collections librarians) will not only need to make sense of the information out there but also to preserve the information for the future. How do we preserve a website? Even the Internet Archive is missing links and images that the original site had. It is also a website, itself inherently unstable. Likewise, CD shelf-life can be as short as 10 years. We need some device, some medium, which can replicate the experience of navigating the digital content without having to rely on a particular hardware system which will not exist in 50 years (dare I say 15 years?). So far there is no such thing but there is a desperate need for it. To curate content a librarian will need to utilize innovate ways of finding and organizing, but also as-yet undiscovered techniques at preserving both analog and digital content.

By: Disobedientlib

Disobedientlib — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 12:27:18 +0000

What if there were a platform that melded features of Wikipedia and delicious/Diigo (and that could identify duplicate urls at minimum) and that librarians and other content experts around the world (it would somehow need to be able to keep out spammers, marketers, etc.) could harness and collaborate on to both identify, coherently tag, annotate and share web and social media resources? Users could then search the entire thing, subscribe to tags or content contributors, etc. A sort of un-WorldCat?

A total pipe dream, I know, but one can dream…

By: Bobsled

Bobsled — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 20:57:23 +0000

But curators have to earn the right to be called curators. What makes a staff of researchers curators that anyone would actually admire or turn to?

Look at Twitter. You can’t get or keep followers unless you’re actually good at what you do. People like the freedom to pick and choose the curators they get their information from.

By: Mark Moran

Mark Moran — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 17:23:50 +0000

At findingDulcinea, our tagline is “librarian of the Internet” – and we have reserved the URL “CuratorOfTheInternet” – we have long seen the need for someone to play this role. Internet users want to view content from a broad array of sources; thus the popularity of search engines and recommendation services. And yet search engine satisfaction is plummeting, and the recommendation services provide content a mile wide and an inch deep, and are fraught with conflicts. When we create Beyond the Headlines articles at findingDulcinea, much of our effort is invested in finding the best links on the Web that will provide full context to the story, and then weaving them together into a coherent theme. We’ve all read the articles asking whether search engines have made us stupid, by causing us to skim across the surface of the Web without ever fully understanding anything we read; curators are the antidote, and the need for them will become much more apparent as Internet users become continually more aware of just how poorly search engines serve them.

By: Rohit

Rohit — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 16:38:51 +0000

Hi all,
Interesting points that several of you raised, particularly on the stat. It was something I heard in a presentation, but I don’t have a link to prove it, so I’m totally willing to admit that is may be an exaggeration. 78% of stats are totally fabricated anyway.

The more important point, however, is that content online is exploding and will continue to grow exponentially (regardless of what you feel the actual exponent will be). The reason I love the fact that this conversation moves in the realm of Library 2.0 is because most digital folks tend to talk in terms of content creation. Even the “Chief Content Officer” concept is partially about creating content rather than just curating it. Librarians, on the other hand, could certainly be authors – but in most cases they are not. The value they bring is to help bring out the best content and connect it to people. That is a skill that many corporations need, and few realize they are missing.

By: Graeme Siddle

Graeme Siddle — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 03:40:22 +0000

Really interesting post David. Thanks. I think that probably there are many librarians performing this role but not focusing entirely on web content as you say. Librarians are the obvious professionals to move into this role using their skills of:
- locating digital information
- evaluating the information found and making decisions on how to use it
- knowing their clients and their needs
- analyzing and making sense of the information so that it can be used
- organising, storing and preserving the information for future uses.

These information literacy skills are ones that the librarian as an information specialist has.
I would salute the employer who hires someone as a content curator – searching online and through social networking sites takes so long!
The use of the word ‘curator’ challenged me – it made me think immediately of museum and art galleries where stuff is being preserved and yet I know that curators work at making sense of objects and works of art before making them available for the public. Maybe if CCs become a reality I’d get used to the idea.
I’ll be posting about this on my own blog too which focuses on Trade Librarian and Information Professionals – a challenge for us: http://www.tralis.blogspot.com/