Mlonyeni Lufu Chisi

When  organisations commence data curation initiatives, they often focus on the exciting parts such as metadata tagging and building shiny new repositories. But long-term data preservation comes with a massive, often invisible tail of ongoing operational challenges.  If you want your data to survive and remain useful five or ten years from now, then you will have to look past the technology and confront the two biggest icebergs in the room which are financial sustainability and human capital.   The Financial Reality: Budgets vs Actual Costs Many organisations treat data preservation as a capital expense such as a one-time purchase of servers or cloud storage. However, in reality, preservation is a long-term operational expense which requires huge financial muscle, (Marimuthu, 2021). When  building a data curation budget, organisations frequently overlook  hidden expenses  such as ingestion costs. These include issues such quality control, virus scanning and...

 This week we are continuing our journey on data curation and preservation and specifically organisational issues in this subject matter. As mentioned in our earlier topics, data curation refers to the continuous management of digital information across the lifecycle of records to ensure that records remain accessible, authentic, reliable and usable over time. Sinclair et al., (2011) point out that it is important to note that digital assets play a vital role in supporting governance, accountability, research and service delivery. Whilst technological advancements have significantly improved preservation capabilities, organisational dynamics remain a decisive determinant of the success or failure of digital curation initiatives. Some of the factors that might contribute to weaknesses in governance structures in the preservation of  digital records include human resources capacity and limited funding allocations, (Bermes & Fauduet, 2011). One of the issues that affects data...

This week we are looking at Data Curation Preservation Issues (Threats to Digital Materials). The Digital Preservation Coalition (2015) in Hurley and Marks (2023) defines digital preservation as the series of managed activities necessary to ensure continued access to digital materials for as long as necessary. Wisconsin (2004) emphasises that digital curation are the actions needed to maintain and utilise digital data and research results over their entire life cycle. Yakel (2007) in Dobreva and Duff (2015) explains digital curation as the active involvement of information professionals in the management, including preservation of digital data for future use.  This involves the selection, maintenance, dissemination, preservation and adding value to digital assets. Examples of these activities could include the development of repositories for digital resources, the creation and /or selection of digital assets, creation and management of metadata and management and provision for diss...