The Content Strategist as Digital Curator. The term “curate” is the interactive world’s new buzzword. During content creation and governance discussions, client pitches and creative brainstorms, I’ve watched this word gain traction at almost warp speed. As a transplant from museums and libraries into interactive media, I can’t help but ask what is it about this word that deserves redefinition for the web? Article Continues Below Curation has a distinguished history in cultural institutions.
In galleries and museums, curators use judgment and a refined sense of style to select and arrange art to create a narrative, evoke a response, and communicate a message. As the digital landscape becomes increasingly complex, and as businesses become ever more comfortable using the web to bring their product and audience closer, the techniques and principles of museum curatorship can inform how we create online experiences—particularly when we approach content. How does a content strategist act as a digital curator? What’s the payoff? Be the curator of your favorite topic! Some thoughts on curation – adding context and telling stories « Derivadow.com. Just over two years ago I wrote a post about the importance of the resource and the URL — and I still stand by what I said there: the core of a website should be the resource and its URL. And if those resources describe real world things and they are linked together in the way people think about the world then you can navigate the site by hopping from resource to resource in an intuitive fashion.
But I think I missed something important in that post — the role of curation, the role of storytelling. When we started work on Wildlife Finder we designed the site around the core concepts that we knew people cared about and those that we had content about i.e. species, their habitats and adaptations, and we’ve been publishing resources about those concepts since last September.
We’ve since published the model (Wildlife Ontology) describing how those concepts relate together. Like this: Like Loading... Web Content & Digital Curation. Why Curation Is Just as Important as Creation [OPINION]