Digitizing Your Home Videos: A Digital Curation Topic

Assignment Overview:

Raising digital curation awareness among communities of stakeholders is a critical role for digital curation professionals, particularly as you may be asked to engage and inform communities with little to no knowledge of key concepts and goals underlying digital curation practice. The intent of this assignment is to provide opportunity to develop skills in communicating with uninformed stakeholder communities, whether these are comprised of producers, consumers, funders, senior management, or colleagues from other departments/units within your organization. It is inspired in part by the “Dummies” book series, though that word is, well, snarky. For this assignment, you will select a central concept, topic, or proposed project in digital curation. You will be evaluated on two output: 1) a recorded class presentation (approximately 10 to 15 minutes); and 2) an infographic to be distributed to the class as a supplement to your presentation.

Assignment Outcome:

Outcome 1 requires students to be able to “describe and discuss the processes of creation, organization, distribution, storage, access, retrieval, management, use, and preservation of information.” My Digital Curation in a Nutshell assignment from 562 was successful in this task by informing communities of stakeholders of digital information curation. My assignment topic of digitizing and preserving personal videotape collections showcases my knowledge of preservation best practices and processes. I was able to successfully describe and discuss the need for digital information management in my assignment. My digital curation project consisted of a short, eye-catching infographic and video presentation that could be used by digital curation professionals looking to engage and inform communities with little to no knowledge of preservation concepts and video digitization goals. In the infographic and video presentation, I discuss the underlying digital curation practices behind digitizing videos. This includes steps for novices to follow to create digital video files, ways to organize and store the files on a computer after creation, data management tips (ex. never edit the original file and save it in multiple places), and preservation and storage for the physical copies. My video on the topic goes into greater detail on these strategies and processes than the infographic, but both specifically relate to Outcome 1. The assignment provided me an opportunity to effectively discuss and describe videotape digitization to users, so I was able to gain knowledge on specific information practices due to the considerable amount of time spent learning extensively about the topic.