Selecting a Digital Curation Tool

In today’s world of ever-growing digital content there is aseemingly infinite amount of information available. Finding what you need, whenyou need it, is increasingly challenging. Fortunately, there is help: digitalcuration.

Digital curation is a growing need for anyone who routinelyuses the Internet, and is especially important for workplace learningprofessionals, since our job is to help people work better. Part of that taskis finding the best resources available that workers can use to supportlearning and bringing those resources to their attention.

Curation, step by step

There are a great number of digital curation tools available.There are popular curation tools that you may have already experimented with,like Scoop.it, Storify, or Pinterest, as well as dozens of others that youmight not have even heard of. As is so often the case, deciding which tool youwant to use requires you to match the features offered by each tool against exactlywhat it is you are trying to accomplish.

There are three major tasks associated with the act of curation:discovery, selection, and distribution.

Discovery

Discovery is the process of seeking out and finding the typeof content you may want to curate. How effectively a digital curation toolaccommodates the discovery phase ultimately comes down to two questions.

Question 1: What data sources can the tool access?

There is an endless sea of digital information online, and mostdigital curation tools only access small portions of it through very specificportals. It’s critical that you know where the information you want to curatefrom is located and check if the digital curation tool you are interested inhas access to it.

Just about every curation tool can curate from open webpages,and ultimately most web content comes down to an open webpage. The challenge isbeing able to search from a specific data service directly from the curationtool. Most tools can search Twitter. However, as you start looking at othersources your tool options narrow considerably. Need to curate from Facebook?It’s a shorter list. Need to pull from Instagram, Slideshare, YouTube, or Flickr?Only a few tools may fit that need.

Question 2: How effectively does the tool filter the data source?

Accessing a data source like Twitter, Facebook, orSlideshare is one thing; being able to effectively filter the data source sothat you only see the type of information you might want to curate is somethingelse.

Some tools only allow for very basic text-based filtering.This might be enough to fulfill your needs, but sometimes you need deeperfilters. Some of the tools have much deeper filtering options to help you findwhat you need. Finding a tool that filters effectively based on your needsmight require some experimentation.

For example, Storify enables you to filter the Twitter feedto show only images, a timeline, specific users, and more (Figure 1).

Figure 1: Storify supports filtering your Twitter feed forimages, the timeline, specific users, lists, or for favorites

Scoop.it also enables power searches, even including theability to directly filter using Twitter’s advanced operators(Figure 2).

Figure 2: Scoop.it offers more powerful search and filtercapabilities

Selection

Selection is the heart of curation. For now, machines have limitsto their filtering ability. A human still needs to make a conscious decision tocurate a specific resource. You don’t base that curation decision solely on thefact that the resource popped up in a filtered list within the tool. Thecurator always needs to review the resource and make sure it matches the themesand purpose of the curation.

Even though it is largely a human responsibility, selectionis still an important factor to consider when deciding on a digital curationtool.

While there may be times in your day that you dedicatesolely to seeking out resources to curate, you will also stumble upon valuableresources during the normal course of your workday. Someone may forward a linkin an email, or you may come across a valuable article while working online. Youwant to capture those resources instantly for curation purposes, without havingto completely break your workflow to open a new browser window to access the curationtool website.

A number of digital curation tools address this issue usingbrowser bookmarklets or plug-ins. These tools allow individuals to instantlycurate from the webpage they are currently viewing. When a user clicks one ofthe bookmarklets or browser extensions, a small window opens that allows theuser to instantly curate the resource (Figure 3).

Figure 3: Bookmarklets, such as Scoop.it, allow you toinstantly curate a resource from your browser

Distribution

Once you’ve decided which resources you want to share withyour audience, the final step is to publish and distribute what you’ve curated.Most digital curation tools allow you to directly post and share your curationvia social media outlets such as Twitter or Facebook.

Keep in mind that most online curation tools are set up withbusiness marketing in mind, not necessarily learning. Most of these servicesonly share curation publicly, and that’s something you may need to factor inwhen deciding which digital curation tool to use.

For instance, if I worked for a bank and was using Scoop.itas a resource to help workers learn more about banking in general, it might beokay. In fact, you might even make the argument that the bank is giving back tothe community by providing such a resource, even if the primary reason forcreating it was employee education.

However, I might also want to curate information specificallyabout our competition. I might curate articles about their financialperformance, new branch openings, or other information that may help uscompete. As an organization, I’d probably be less inclined to have that informationavailable publicly.

If you have a need to share curated resources privately,your tool options today are going to be limited. However, as more digitalcuration tools begin offering paid subscription options with additionalfeatures, you can expect to see more availability of private sharing.

Try before you buy (or commit)

While different digital curation tools overlap in their functionality,each one has unique features that make it somewhat unique. Scoop.it presentscuration in a newspaper-like format, while Storify presents in a linear, almostchronological fashion and Pearltrees shows relationships between resources visuallyvia its node system. No single one is necessarily better than any other; thequestion is which one best accomplishes the ultimate intent and goal of yourcuration.

Scoop.it, Storify, and Pearltrees are three of the mostpopular digital curation tools available today. If you want to see a moreextensive list of options, a great place to start is SocialCompare’s Comparison of Curation Platforms, which provides a nice breakdown of the featuresavailable from different tools.

Most of the digital curation tools available today have robust functionality that is available completely free. There’s no investment (other than time) required to test different tools and find the one that works best for you.