What Does it Mean to Curate Content

Immediately when thinking about the idea of curating content, I began to compare the concept to that of a museum curator. Our assignment for this week in EDTECH 543 was to research the idea of content curation and the role of content curator and then to create a checklist for content curation. As I did more reading on the subject, I realized that I wasn’t really that far off.

A museum curator has a whole lot of artifacts at their disposal. If you’ve seen the “Night at the Museum” movies, you might have an idea of that scope just by the scenes that happened in the warehouses. The museum curator takes all those artifacts they have and create an exhibit from a carefully selected group of those artifacts. They don’t squish them all into the space because it would look cluttered and many of the individual pieces might lose any sense of belonging or purpose. In the same way, the inclusion of certain artifacts into a carefully curated exhibit brings an additional amount of meaning and value to the individual piece.

Content curation isn’t that dissimilar to museum curation; Pick the right pieces and arrange them in a meaningful exhibit that adds value and prompts discussion.

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The curation of content is very similar. There are any number of content aggregators out there who merely just pick up the different content pieces from around the internet and repost them with no added commentary or value at all. They’re very much like the warehouses of the museum. A whole lot of artifacts without any real purpose or meaning in their clustered, jumbled state. It’s when the content is carefully curated, sorted by category, with value added through commentary, that the content becomes a part of the exhibit.

It was with this idea in mind that I created my curation checklist this week. It’s simple and concise. It also is missing a few things. Certain categories and subjects might require additional things to be fully curated. I imagine that there are certain mediums that might require a slightly different list as well. But, for informational content, I think my checklist is fairly complete. I’ll embed it here, but here’s the link to my curation checklist as well.

How do you think of content curation? Are there things that exist on your checklist that I missed? Or that are specific to your particular field or medium?