Bridging by Design: the Curation and Management of Digital Assets Specialization at the University of Maryland Katie Shilton, Bruce Ambacher, Michael Kurtz, Douglas W. Oard Erik Mitchell, Ann Weeks College of Information Studies and UMIACS College of Information Studies, University of Maryland College Park, College Park, MD, USA University of Maryland College Park oard@umd.edu College Park, MD, USA kshilton@umd.edu, bambache@umd.edu, mkurtz1@umd.edu, erik@umd.edu, acweeks@umd.edu Abstract—The Curation and Management of Digital Assets preservation, and current and future access to digital assets in a specialization in the College of Information Studies at the variety of disciplines and sectors of the economy. While many University of Maryland focuses on instruction in the creation, Information School (iSchool) and Library and Information management and use, long-term preservation, and access to digital Science (LIS) programs focus on curation of science and research assets in a variety of disciplines and sectors of the economy. This data [4], our program has adopted a broader scope. Because of paper describes the development of this new specialization, which will include students from two degree programs: a Master’s in our location, student needs, and faculty expertise, we are Library & Information Science, and a Master’s in Information developing a curriculum to highlight data curation throughout the Management. The paper discusses interdisciplinary opportunities information professions, ranging from cultural heritage data, to for the program, including a demonstrated cross-sector need sensitive personal data in the healthcare, advertising, and security among employers in the region, as well as the opportunity to industries, to the “big data” cultivated by scientists and other strengthen the college’s interdisciplinary mission. It also discusses researchers. To accomplish this range of instruction, we are challenges presented by the program, including developing taking a multidisciplinary approach that bridges two master’s curriculum to train students with diverse work backgrounds and degree programs: the Master’s in Information Management technical expertise, and bridging divergent expertise and skill sets (MIM), with a focus on strategic deployment of information among the faculty and professionals who will teach in the program. technology; and the Master’s in Library Science (MLS), with a Keywords—Digital curation, curriculum development. focus on professional information services. I. INTRODUCTION II. OPPORTUNITIES: DEFINING THE NEED Digital information is at the heart of our society’s ability to The human capital needed to manage digital information is learn, conduct business, and manage scientific, technological, currently outstripped by the amount of digital information being industrial, and information infrastructure. Technical, societal, and created. It is estimated that by 2018, the United States will have a conceptual challenges confront the effective curation and shortage of 140,000-190,000 people with the analytical and management of digital assets in the public, private, and not-for- technical skills needed to manage large holdings of digital assets profit sectors nationally and internationally. The field of digital [5]. Moreover, it is estimated that as many as 1.5 million assets curation and management is a relatively new and rapidly managers and analysts will need to have the knowledge to use evolving area for research and practice. The rapid growth of managed digital assets in strategic decision-making [5]. Digital electronic information and the need to actively manage this curation skills are necessarily multidisciplinary in nature, and information is recognized in diverse communities [1]–[3]. these skills are a pressing need in public, academic and corporate environments [6]. The Curation and Management of Digital Assets (CMDA) specialization in the College of Information Studies at the In the Washington, D.C.-Baltimore metropolitan region, the University of Maryland (the UMD iSchool) has been designed to need for professionals to curate and manage digital assets is focus on the creation, management and use, long-term acute. Major corporations, international organizations, universities, a diverse ecosystem of not-for-profit entities and specialization that will serve two distinct student groups: those advocacy groups, and an exceptional range of cultural pursuing an MLS (Master of Library Science) degree, and those institutions, all have a need for skilled professionals in the digital pursuing an MIM (Master of Information Management) degree. assets arena. The region’s employers also include federal, state, In addition, the coursework developed for the CDMA and local agencies dealing with e-government challenges, and specialization can support students in our doctoral program who military and intelligence agencies that require scalable, are interested in pursuing research in this dynamic area. responsive and secure management of digital assets. Similar In recent years, the UMD iSchool has responded to increasing needs exist among the broad and diverse range of research interest in information technology education by adding a new institutions in our community, which develop and use master’s degree program focused on human-computer particularly complex forms of digital information. These interaction. Adding new degree programs allows us to serve new activities include advanced medical imaging research at the markets, but new degree programs alone would not fully realize National Institutes of Health, the National Institute of Standards the potential of an iSchool for integrating across different types and Technology’s long-term commitment to material science, of knowledge and different ways of knowing. That’s one reason extensive environmental data assembled by the Environmental why we elected to create a multiple-program specialization for Protection Agency, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric digital curation rather than rolling out a new degree program. Administration’s vital meteorological data, and geospatial, satellite and remote sensing data collected by a range of federal The evolution of library schools into iSchools, of which agencies. Add to this one of the largest concentrations of major UMD’s transition to an iSchool is an example, has provided an research universities in the nation, and the market demand for opportunity to embrace the kinds of knowledge required for the these skills becomes clear. management and curation of digital assets. The UMD iSchool focuses on the intersection of people, technologies, and social As an example that is particularly salient for the UMD context. The school retains a deep focus on LIS education, and iSchool student body (about three-fifths of whom are studying includes existing specializations in Archives and Records for an ALA-accredited degree), on the most recent American Management, E-Government, School Libraries, and Information Library Association (ALA) Jobsite, 20% of 267 position and Diverse Populations. Principles and skills taught in these announcements were either specifically seeking digital resource programs, such as appraisal, preservation, and information managers/archivists, or listed the expectation that successful policy, provide a rich foundation for the new CDMA candidates would have knowledge, skills, and abilities in specialization. One notable characteristic of the evolution of LIS managing, preserving, curating, and cataloging digital resources. programs into iSchools has been an increased integration of The potential student population for this proposed information technology in many aspects of our work [7]. Our specialization is substantial. The UMD iSchool currently enrolls growth as an iSchool has introduced new faculty and new about 500 students across four highly selective graduate infrastructure that the CDMA specialization will be able to draw programs. Our students have embraced the idea of upon. This will facilitate instruction in skills such as database specializations, which allow them to focus their educational design, migration and emulation, information retrieval, and web- experience on a rich and important aspect of their studies. As an scale information processing. example, an existing specialization in Archives and Records CMDA will be the first “joint” specialization in the UMD Management was able to accept only about one-third of the 125 iSchool, designed to meet the needs of students in more than one applicants for its Fall 2012 class. Offering the CMDA will of our masters programs. This responds to the expressed interests expand the popular specialization option. of MLS and MIM students in opportunities to draw on skills and There are currently few programs of this type in the perspectives well developed in the other program. A cross- Washington-Baltimore region. Though several US information program focus gives us the opportunity to accomplish this skill schools have begun digital curation programs, none are in this sharing by creating an interdisciplinary learning community geographic area [4]. It is also important to note that although patterned after the design of iSchools themselves. neighboring business schools and technology programs do Students from both degree programs will take classes include a focus on data analysis, they tend not to emphasize together and share their skills. While this will create some digital curation, management, and preservation. challenges—students in these programs often come from III. MEETING THE NEED different undergraduate and professional backgrounds and have The UMD iSchool plans to meet this multi-sector need for diverse interests—it will also create unique synergies. data curation training and research by creating an integrated Information professionals of all stripes must learn the interdisciplinary skills required to work in a 21st century digitalized) assets in the public, commercial, or not-for- information economy. This requires professionals trained in profit sector. traditional information practices such as reference or preservation A. Curriculum to work alongside professionals with strong technical backgrounds. Helping students embrace interdisciplinarity The Curation and Management of Digital Assets requires building the necessary trust relationships to work side- specialization will consist of three courses that are required of all by-side with those who bring different experience and expertise. students (described below), plus two additional curation-focused Students graduating from the digital curation specialization will electives. Students will take these classes in addition to the core have the academic, technical, and practical and experiential skills and elective courses for their MLS or MIM degree program. to work in diverse organizational settings in the business and Principles of Digital Curation is the introductory course for commercial sectors, cultural organizations, the digital arts and the specialization, focusing on teaching the values, principles, humanities, and scientific research and development. and approaches underlying the profession [6], [8]. This course The specialization will enable students to develop a range of explores the principles, theories, and standards involved in practical and analytical skills to provide the technical and designing and implementing programs for the long-term management leadership for born-digital and digitized assets as management of digital assets, both born-digital and digitized defined by research in the broader digital curation community. assets. Digital assets management decision-making is analyzed Our program follows core competencies such as those developed by evaluating the technical, practical, economic, legal, social and by the ongoing DigCur research project [8] and throughout the political factors that provide the framework for the retention, use, digital curation literature [6]. Students will master core and preservation of digital assets. Case studies are presented in competencies in managing the digital assets life cycle in the classes that explore the analytic prisms through which digital classroom, and will demonstrate this mastery in hands-on, real- assets management decisions are made. world internship opportunities. Upon successfully completing the Implementing Digital Curation focuses on introducing Curation and Management of Digital Assets specialization a students to the functions and skills necessary for digital curation, student will be able to: as well as the types of resources with which they should be • Manage digital assets over the life cycle from pre- familiar. It will instruct students in the management of, and creation activities (systems design, file formats, and data technology tools for, application of digital curation principles in creation standards) through the capture of contextual specific settings. This course will highlight characteristics, information for assets in long-term repositories. representation, conversion, and preservation of digital objects, • Understand the issues and challenges involved in and instruct in the application of standards for digitization, managing digital assets in diverse professional description, and preservation. Students will gain experience environments (e.g., business, science, the arts and planning for sustainability, risk mitigation and disaster recovery. humanities, libraries, archives, and museums). Policy Issues in Digital Curation focuses on the • Identify and apply best practices and strategies for long- organizational, political and cultural contexts in which impact term preservation and access to digital assets. digital curation. The course will explore the intellectual property, • Understand linkages between analog and digital assets privacy, and security issues related to curation and long-term and how to effectively manage diverse holdings and preservation of digital information. Bridging law, social science, collections. computer science, and professional practice, this course will • Conduct and apply research affecting the on-going focus on understanding copyright and other forms of intellectual evolution in managing digital assets. property raised by preservation copies of digital data and records; • Demonstrate awareness of the social contexts involved in dealing with complex privacy issues in digital data and records; managing digital assets and the needs and roles of securing integrity and trust in digital information and content various stakeholders. throughout the information lifecycle; and implementing security • Demonstrate an understanding of the intersection of for digital information in a range of contexts. legal, ethical, policy, and political sensitivities in After completing the required courses, specialization students managing digital assets. will select two elective courses from a range of curation-focused • Apply academic principles and theories in a practical possibilities, including new courses such as personal digital work setting involving the management of digital (and curation and curation in cultural institutions; technology-focused courses such as database design, information retrieval systems, and information architecture; and courses from our archives and and useful blend. The CMDA specialization is designed to take records management specialization such as principles of records advantage of this combination. Information professionals with a and information management and electronic records. Integrating multidisciplinary curation background can be influential actors in archival principles with data management education will allow the emerging data economy. Training professionals who can students to prepare for diverse disciplinary and multi-sector grapple with both the social and technical impacts of emerging careers. technologies will strengthen our ability to deal with the data deluge. B. Instruction The faculty who will teach in the CMDA specialization draw D. Internship on a broad range of expertise, including electronic records All students enrolled in the digital curation specialization will management, digitization, digital preservation, databases, be expected to complete a supervised internship (a “field study”) information retrieval systems, ethics, and privacy. They also focused on the curation of digital assets. The internship can be bring experience in a broad range of institutional settings in the completed at any of a wide variety of area businesses, non- public, commercial and not-for-profit sectors. They are profits, government agencies, or cultural heritage institutions. developing a range of pedagogical activities to build knowledge The student will gain hands-on practical experience, acquire of information technologies and bridge this expertise with the skills for their career, and begin to build a network for future larger technical, social and policy issues that shape the practice of employment. The UMD iSchool has a database of approximately digital curation. For example, the familiar site Facebook takes on 150 institutions that have expressed an ongoing interest in layers of complexity when students are asked to evaluate the providing field study experiences for students, and we anticipate medium from the standpoints of professional data managers, that our new CMDA specialization will generate interest from preservation professionals, current and future employers, or law additional employers. enforcement agencies. A design game might ask students to sit in the position of engineers, and make choices between values such E. Research Opportunities as long-term retention, efficiency, and privacy: values choices Digital curation is a field ripe for research exploration, with that data managers must face every day. Projects in each course unanswered questions in work processes and practice, technology expand on these experiences by engaging students directly in applications, policy and ethics, and market and political systems thinking. Like the computational thinking [9], we see economies. For both master’s and doctoral students interested in systems thinking as applicable across the full range of technical, pursuing research related to the curation and management of organizational and social issues that inform digital curation digital assets, there are opportunities available through decisions. partnerships with individual faculty and through working with a The goal of these activities is to foster mastery of 21st century broad range of research labs and centers. The specialization skills such as critical thinking, decision making, and problem articulates with, and draws upon, related research interests of our solving [10]. To evaluate student learning in these areas, faculty. For example, venues where research on the technical, instructors will use a combination of classroom participation, oral policy, and implementation challenges of digital curation is being presentations, written assignments, and technical assignments. conducted include the Information Policy and Access Center C. Promoting Multiple Areas of Expertise (www.ipac@umd.edu), the Human Computer Interaction Laboratory (http://hcil.cs.umd.edu), the Maryland Institute for One component of the CMDA specialization is the ability for Technology in the Humanities (http://mith.umd.edu), the Center students to double-specialize, gaining expertise in both digital for the Advanced Study of Communities and Information curation and another area of information management or LIS (http://casci.umd.edu), and the Computational Linguistics and practice. Digital curation is inextricably linked with many other Information Processing Lab (http://wiki.umiacs.umd.edu/clip/). topics, and both MLS and MIM degree programs have additional Faculty projects include preservation of online games, data specializations that CDMA students may wish to pursue. For curation by online communities, participatory data management example, an MLS student might pursue a specialization in E- in health and science, ethical challenges in personal information government, in Archives and Records Management, or in management, and experiential reconstruction of the Apollo Information and Diverse Populations; a MIM student might missions from archival sources. pursue a specialization in Strategic Management of Information or in Technology Development and Deployment. IV. CHALLENGES The combination of humanistic, social science, and The Creation and Management of Digital Assets technology literacy fostered in information programs is a crucial specialization will begin in the fall of 2013. Although we are excited to launch the specialization, we anticipate some recently, library schools transitioned into iSchools, in part by challenges as well. One major challenge will be the diversity of adding exactly the kinds of technical expertise that we now need student preparation for the societal, organizational and technical to draw on as digital curation extends its organizational scope aspects of the program. For example, some students interested in and reach. In our new specialization we now take the next logical the CMDA specialization might arrive with strong academic step in building on this confluence of interest. preparation, but little work experience. Others might have As Dennis Gabor (the inventor of holography) observed in extensive organizational and management experience, but little 1963, the future cannot be predicted, but futures can be invented. hands-on familiarity with advanced information technologies. It is the role of a research university to teach at the leading edge Still others may have extensive knowledge of information of what we know, to teach when there is not yet complete systems, but less understanding of the organizational and social agreement on what should be taught, and to add to what we know factors that shape, and are shaped by, their work. It is a challenge as we teach it. For an iSchool, that leading edge has reached to to address all of these types of knowledge gaps at one time and in digital curation, and that, therefore, is where we plan to be. one classroom. Realizing the full potential of our program will require that ACKNOWLEDGMENTS we draw heavily on peer learning. While this diversity of The authors would like to thank the UMD faculty who expertise and experience is a pedagogical challenge, it is worked to shape the specialization, including Brian Butler, Mary simultaneously a team-building strength. We envision CMDA Choquette, Kari Kraus, Trevor Muñoz, and Ricardo Punzalan. In students working together in agile teams that foster peer learning, addition, many thanks to iSchool Dean Jennifer Preece for and reorganizing those teams around different challenges as they encouragement and support of this program. emerge over the course of a semester. REFERENCES A second important challenge is integrating the broad and [1] Danah boyd and K. Crawford, “Critical questions for big data,” diverse intellectual content that underpins the CDMA Information, Communication & Society, vol. 15, no. 5, pp. 662–679, 2012. specialization. Such integration is complicated by divergent [2] T. Hey and A. E. Trefethen, “The data deluge: an e-Science Perspective,” expertise and skill sets among both faculty and professionals who in Grid Computing: Making the Global Infrastructure a Reality, New York: will teach in this program. Meeting this challenge will not be Wiley, 2003, pp. 809–824. achieved by assigning single faculty members to teach single [3] “Personal data: the emergence of a new asset class,” World Economic courses. Instead, we will need to work together, not just in Forum, Geneva, Switzerland, Jan. 2011. planning the specialization but also as we implement the [4] L. Jahnke, A. Asher, and S. D. C. Keralis, “The Problem of Data,” Council on Library and Information Resources, Washington, D.C., Aug. 2012. educational experience for our students. Integration of diverse [5] J. Manyika, M. Chui, B. Brown, J. Bughin, R. Dobbs, C. Roxburgh, and A. disciplinary knowledge has always been a challenging task, but H. Byers, “Big data: The next frontier for innovation, competition, and this integration, writ large, is the very mission for which iSchools productivity,” McKinsey Global Institute, Seoul, San Francisco, London, were created. That’s not said to minimize the scope of the and Washington DC, May 2011. challenge, but rather to claim that the challenge is worth facing in [6] E. Yakel, “Digital curation,” OCLC Systems & Services, vol. 23, no. 4, pp. this way. 335–340, Nov. 2007. [7] A. Wiggins and S. Sawyer, “Intellectual diversity and the faculty These pedagogical and disciplinary challenges highlight the composition of iSchools,” Journal of the American Society for Information need for ongoing faculty preparation for teaching digital curation. Science and Technology. We have taken the first step by assembling a broad team of [8] C. A. Lee, “Matrix of Digital Curation Knowledge and Competencies,” DigCCurr, Chapel Hill, NC, Jun. 2009. faculty with diverse expertise and experience, drawn from both [9] J. M. Wing, “Computational thinking,” Commun. ACM, vol. 49, no. 3, pp. academia and professional practice. Attending professional 33–35, Mar. 2006. development events such as the DigCurV conference will be an [10] Partnership for 21st Century Skills, “Framework for 21st century learning,” important step as we learn to think broadly together about how Partnership for 21st Century Learning, Washington, D.C., Mar. 2011. best to address these challenges. [11] J. M. O’Toole, “The History of Archives and the Archives Profession,” in Understanding Archives and Manuscripts, Chicago, IL: Society of V. CONCLUSION American Archivists, 1990, pp. 27–47. We see the new specialization in Curation and Management of Digital Assets as a natural next step on a path we have been following for many years. Decades ago, education in archives and records management, once the domain of Ph.D. programs in History, professionalized within library schools [11]. More