My area of interest for the final project is currently digital curation and how I am able to apply what we have learned regarding scholarly communication to it. With this discipline being relatively novel, it could provide an interesting picture of how it has navigated the dynamic landscape of scholarly communication since it was incepted at a time where many older modes of scholarly communication were potentially becoming less relevant with the advent of the internet providing new tools and modes of communicating. A boon to choosing this topic is that UNC’s own Helen Tibbo seems to be a key figure, which provides an opportunity for me to interview them as a means to ask questions specific to scholarly communication and how it relates to the field of digital curation, and potentially where it is going looking forward.
Through different organization websites that have webinars, training materials (OER potentially!) and seminars (physical or online), much can potentially be elaborated upon with regards to the concept of the invisible college as a form of scholarly communication (in refence to the seminar aspect). There are clear instances that articulate how this field prizes communication as a means to make it grow and evolve, and I can hopefully exploit that as a means to gain salient inferences on how it operates in reference to scholarly communication.
Helen and Cal Lee are both leading figures digital curation. Please spell out more specifically what you hope to accomplish and be able to report on.
I want to focus on the prevalence of education tools related to the field of digital curation, whether they be in the OER format or housed on organization websites like the IIPC (netpreserve.net), where they can take shape as webinars, training documents and other community based training resources that aim to not just be inviting introductions for the uninitiated to digital curation, but also foster an environment that encourages interested parties to become members of and actively participate in the digital curation invisible college. With the relative novelty of this field, I hope to trace the path that digital curation as a field has proceeded upon in order to gauge how it aims to broaden the world's awareness of it's importance through the various freely accessible educational resources that are found on various organization websites or tool databases like COPTR.
I would like to take some time to further discuss this with you after class in order to potentially refine the scope/direction of this project.