Digital Curation and Doctoral Research: Current Practice

This article considers digital curation in doctoral study and the role of the doctoral supervisor and institution in facilitating students’ acquisition of digital curation skills, including some of the potentially problematic expectations of the supervisory relationship with regards to digital curation. Research took the form of an analysis of the current digital curation training landscape, focussing on doctoral study and supervision. This was followed by a survey (n=116) investigating attitudes towards importance, expertise, and responsibilities regarding digital curation. This research confirms that digital curation is considered to be very important within doctoral study but that doctoral supervisors and particularly students consider themselves to be largely unskilled at curation tasks. It provides a detailed picture of curation activity within doctoral study and identifies the areas of most concern. A detailed analysis demonstrates that most of the responsibility for curation is thought to lie with students and that institutions are perceived to have very low responsibility, whilst individuals tend to over-assign responsibility to themselves. Finally, the research identifies the most common types of support system for curation and suggests ways in which students, supervisors, institutions, and others can effectively and efficiently address problematic areas and improve digital curation within doctoral study. Received 2 October 2014 | Revised 6 January 2015 | Accepted 10 February 2015 Correspondence should be addressed to Daisy Abbott, Digital Design Studio, The Hub, Pacific Quay, Glasgow, G51 1EA. Email: [email protected] An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 10 International Digital Curation Conference. The International Journal of Digital Curation is an international journal committed to scholarly excellence and dedicated to the advancement of digital curation across a wide range of sectors. The IJDC is published by the University of Edinburgh on behalf of the Digital Curation Centre. ISSN: 1746-8256. URL: http://www.ijdc.net/ Copyright rests with the authors. This work is released under a Creative Commons Attribution (UK) Licence, version 2.0. For details please see http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/uk/ International Journal of Digital Curation 2015, Vol. 10, Iss. 1, 1–17 1 http://dx.doi.org/10.2218/ijdc.v10i1.328 DOI: 10.2218/ijdc.v10i1.328 2 | Digital Curation and Doctoral Research doi:10.2218/ijdc.v10i1.328