Competencies Required for Digital Curation: An Analysis of Job Advertisements

Abstract

With digital curation’s increasingly important role in the fast-paced and data-intensive information environment, there is a need to identify a set of competencies for professionals in this growing field. As part of a curriculum development project funded by the U.S. Institute of Museum and Library Services, a total of 173 job advertisements posted between October 2011 and April 2012 were collected from various sources to take into account varying types of professionals in the field of digital curation across North America. Position title, institution types and location, educational background, experience, knowledge and skills, and duties were examined and analyzed. The results of the analysis show that digital curation jobs are characterized by a complex interplay of various skills and knowledge. The findings of this study present emerging requirements for a qualified workforce in the field of digital curation.

Scholarly Communication as a Core Competency: Prevalence, Activities, and Concepts of Scholarly Communication Librarianship as Shown Through Job Advertisements

“…They noted that responsibilities included institutional repository work, new publishing models, open access, copyright and authors' rights, and compliance with National Institute of Health (NIH) public access mandates (p. 274). Kim, Warga, and Moen (2013) looked at 173 job advertisements related to digital curation between October 2011 and April 2012 and concluded that the field "currently intersects with a variety of problems and domains from cultural heritage collections to eScience and data science" (p. 67). Detmering and Sproles (2012) determined scholarly communication to be a duty in 7.3% of the listings they studied and noted that "while not pervasive, scholarly communication emerged as another significant trend, particularly in science subject specialist positions.…”

I dentifying Core Competencies for Records Management and Information Governance Professionals: A Job Advertisement A nalysis

“…First and foremost, it is well suited for this research inquiry. Analysis of job advertisements has been one of the two conventional approaches used for assessing and identifying skill sets required of an occupation (e.g., Ahsan et al, 2013;Harper, 2013;Hoffman & Bresciani, 2012;Kim et al, 2013;Marion, 2001;Marion et al, 2005;Park et al, 2009). The other conventional approach is to conduct surveys on a targeted population.…”

Managing a digital archiving project at the University of the West Indies Library

“…These included some of those Kim, Warga, Moen (2013) analysed in job advertisements for Digital Curation posts. Previous IT knowledge gained from projects such as website development, the Integrated Library System and database development were a plus for the staff.…”