Introducing the Information Culture Framework as a Component of the Digital Curator's Toolkit

The purpose of this paper is to promote the notion of “information culture” as an integral component of the education for digital curation professionals. Understanding the context in which digital artefacts are created and used is essential for their meaning to be knowable, communicable, and preservable over time. Human beings’ attitudes towards information and the values they attach to it are an unexplored aspect of such context. The Information Culture Framework (ICF) that is presented here has been developed to help organizations assess the ‘soft’ factors that enable and constrain their information-related practices. By applying the ICF, digital curators will be able to shed light on the information culture underlying the objects under their purview, to explain how and why such objects are as they are, and to enhance understanding of what they meant to their creators and users.