Building the collections of tomorrow

Abstract

Position Statements for the international forum: Collections as Data: State of the field and future directions, a working event held April 25-26 in Vancouver, Canada.

Cultural heritage curation and data curation are information specializations that are, and should be, increasingly intersecting, especially with the rapid growth of digital cultural heritage resources and tools created by ambitious digitization programs and the rise of complex, computation-driven research in the digital humanities and adjacent fields. Curators have immense power to shape collections – libraries, archives, and museums acquire, describe, interpret, digitize, preserve, and facilitate access to key government and business records, cultural heritage materials, and innumerable unique resources. Curation practice is moving beyond the FAIR6 principles into the CARE principles, which recognizes and empowers the humans and communities often at the center of data collection. This shared area of investment by curators, both of cultural heritage and research data, is a space in which we can support and learn from one another.