Education and Training Across the Digital Curation Spectrum with Dr. Margaret Hedstrom

On Thursday, June 15th, the Smithsonian Libraries, Smithsonian Institution Archives and Smithsonian Office of the Chief Information Officer hosted Dr. Hedstrom, the Robert M. Warner Collegiate Professor of Information Professor of Information at the University of Michigan School of Information, as part of this Information Matters lecture series.

In this talk, "Education and Training Across the Digital Curation Spectrum", Dr. Hedstrom will situates digital curation along a spectrum from a highly specialized profession focusing exclusively on selection, “organization,” access and preservation of digital objects to a basic set of skills in identifying, evaluating, keeping and using digital information that every user of digital technologies should possess. The talk covers the mixture of curation knowledge, domain knowledge, and technology skills that professional curators need, but it also discusses the significance of broad “digital literacy” for achieving effective, scalable and affordable approaches to digital collections. Finally, she discusses new modes of teaching and learning this new set of skills.