Guide for TLs (and on curating digital content)

Lately I’ve been reading a bit about digital content curation, also referred to as human editorial curation or aggregation.  I think we’ve been doing this type of work for a long time in the form of widget-based pathfinders, but now folks seem to be talking about it.

In a recent Mashable post, blogger, author, and NYU professor Clay Shirky is quoted:

Curation comes up when search stops working. But it’s more than a human-powered filter. Curation comes up when people realize that it isn’t just about information seeking, it’s also about synchronizing a community.

Part of the reason that human curation is so critical is simply the vast number of people who are now making and sharing media. Everyone is a media outlet. The point of everyone being a media outlet is really not at all complicated. It just means that we can all put things out in the public view now.

Allen Weiner talks about playlist exchange and about the value of having someone with a passion about a topic matter expressing that passion by aggregating a group of assets into a single asset.

Watch a few of these videos by Allen Weiner and Steve Rosenbaum on CurationNation for reframed definitions and emerging thoughts on the importance of curation.

The stuff I personally need most–the stuff I am passionate about–is published in the most diverse sources, across all sorts of platforms and formats.  Much of it is dynamic, and feedy.  Much of it is a moving target.

I’ve been playing a bit with the notion of curating–for myself and my personal practice, for the librarians in our District, for my practicum students, and perhaps for a broader audience, for synchronizing our community  So here is a beta version of my curation effort–Guide for Teacher Librarians.

Please let me know what is missing.

Filed under: curation, libraries, professional development, research, school libraries, social networking