Marc My Words: From Content Creation to Content Curation: The Importance of Curation

Forthis, my 75^th column, I thought I’d talk about “stuff.”

Stuffis not the most technical term for all the content on the Internet, but whenyou get right down to it, there’s a lot of stuff out there. We’ve put lots ofstuff on the web. Our businesses have put lots of stuff there too. So havegovernment agencies, professional trade associations, and communityorganizations. More stuff than we know what to do with. We are drowning instuff.

Andyet, we continue to churn out more and more stuff. According to IBM, knowledge is doubling every year. And it’s only going to accelerate. Add tothis the shrinking shelf life of that knowledge. The amount of time informationis useful is quickly moving from years, to months, to days. Forget aboutlearning new stuff; sometimes we’re consumed with simply refreshing ourselveswith the old stuff.

Whatare we going to do? We can’t rely on training alone. If we did, we’d be inclass 24/7/365. Not only would nothing productive get done, we’re also notlikely to keep up. Of course, if we’re always in training mode, then none of uswould have time to create any new knowledge at all and, theoretically, allknowledge creation would stop. That’s certainly not what we want.

What’sneeded is a renewed and urgent focus on managing the knowledge we have so thatthe best, most accurate and reliable information rises to the top. Instead of justcreating more knowledge, we also have to curateour current knowledge.

Thelibrary example

Thinkabout public or school libraries. How do they manage not to burst at the seamseach year as they add more books and other resources? You might suggest thatmuch of the collection will be digitized, thus enabling more content to bestored in the same space. While this is true, it is overly simplistic. The keyis determining what content to keep, what to update, and what to throw away. Librarianscontinuously cull, or weed, their collections. They toss out old books to makeroom for the new. They evaluate similar materials to determine what to acquireand what to defer. Their goal: to make the collection as useful and current asthey can while, at the same time, preserving older materials that still havevalue. In other words, they are constantly making judgment calls about content.

Ifyou are digitizing all your organizational content but not making judgmentsabout what to keep, what to get rid of, and what to update, you are likely tobe overwhelmed. Think about simple things like your personal digitized photolibrary. How many photos do you have? Hundreds? Thousands? How many are reallystill valuable? Can you even find them, and, if you did, would you have a planfor making judgments about their value and importance to you? Could you bringyourself to toss out old stuff to make way for the new?

Thecuration challenge

TheInternet is a terrific knowledge repository. The sheer size of the contentstored on the web is unimaginable. And, within organizational intranets, theamount of content that is available is similarly impressive. But is it goodcontent? Is it the right content for the right purpose? Is it up to date? Is itunderstandable? The more we have to ask these questions about online content,the more inefficient our search for the right information will be, and—evenmore of a concern—the more likely it might be that we will find bad content, acton it (believing it is correct), and suffer the consequences.

Content curationfocuses on the accuracy, relevance, usefulness, value, and other aspects ofknowledge assets. Curators are less focused on finding more content than theyare on making sure what they have is the rightcontent.

Let’snot forget the issues of design, organization, navigation, and usability. Clearly,web resources that are poorly designed will be harder to use and would likelylead to user abandonment. A big deal, for sure, but even if we have the best-designedweb interface, it could still be used to deliver the worst-designed content,albeit more efficiently. Not good.

A checklistto get started

Soassuming people can find the content, the question is, was the searchbeneficial? Is the content worthwhile? Here are 10 problems you should rule outas you curate your content:

1. The content is wrong; it never should have been posted in the first place, or it became incorrect and should have been updated or removed.
2. The content is inauthentic; it’s correct, but not relevant to the users or the work they do.
3. The content creator is not reputable; the credentials or expertise of the individual(s) who created the content are called into question.
4. The content is incomplete; much is missing, and the content is fairly useless without additional information.
5. There is too much content; information overload creates user confusion and mental exhaustion, making it difficult to find what’s really useful.
6. The content is biased; it reflects the author or creator’s viewpoint in a way that is inappropriate for the designated use.
7. The content is of low priority or value; the overall usefulness of the content is questionable.
8. The content is painful to read or learn; the design, formatting, writing style, etc., of the content is not matched to the users or their needs.
9. The content conflicts with other content; it is hard to know what is correct and what is incorrect.
10. The content is due to expire; if the content is outdated or due to be replaced, it may not be prudent to maintain or revise the current version (we’ll discuss this more in part three of this series).

Usethese problem identifiers as a beginning checklist for evaluating the contentyou are posting online. If it fails to meet even one of these criteria, youmight consider holding back until you can get it right.

Approachesto content curation