CURATEcamp 2010: What is it?

CURATEcamp 2010: Micro-services and digital curation

Micro-services are a new approach to providing effective and sustainable digital curation solutions that has developed in reaction to the heavy-weight practices of the past. The primary notion underlying the concept is that complex behavior is an emergent property of the composition of simple, interoperable components. Thus, the micro-services approach is characterized by a controlling metaphor:

  • Infrastructure as Lego bricks

A set of general principles:

  • Modularity
  • Granularity
  • Orthogonality
  • Parsimony
  • Evolution
  • Emergence

A set of preferences:

  • Favor the small and simple over the large and complex
  • Favor the minimally sufficient over the feature-laden
  • Favor the configurable over the prescribed
  • Favor the proven over the (merely) novel

A set of practices:

  • Focus on outcomes, not mechanisms
  • Define, decompose, recurse
  • Approach sufficiency through a series of incrementally necessary steps
  • Top-down design, bottom-up implementation
  • Code to interfaces
  • Early prototyping, frequent refactoring
  • Don't hold on to what doesn't work; throw away

and, as we hope to develop, a community.

What is Curation Technology Camp?

It's an unconference event for practitioners who work
on the technical, architectural, and infrastructural parts of digital curation, which
might be defined as the set of processes by which digital content is managed and
preserved.


By "practitioner," we mean that practice and
development are more of interest than theory and research. We imply that there is a community of practice around curation technology that could benefit from more sharing and collaboration.

By
"technical, architectural, and infrastructural parts," we mean that these aspects of
curation are more of interest than organizational, analysis, management, and content
aspects.

By "unconference," we mean an event that is intensely collaborative with a free flow of ideas among participants, a gathering of peer practitioners.


Who might be interested in CURATEcamp?

Anyone who has been charged with storing
and maintaining lots and lots of digital content. This is done all
over: higher education, libraries, archives, public media, and in industry.



These
folks might have titles that contain the words "repository," "archive,"
or "architect," and are interested in topics such as archival
storage, digital
repositories, research data management, e-records stewardship, and more
generally how digital content is structured, stored, described,
maintained,
versioned, packaged, transferred, migrated, archived, replicated, and so forth.



What would the Camp look like, and what would we talk about?

Like all unconferences, the agenda will be determined by the participants. The overall theme is curation micro-services. Some potential topics are:

  • software/tools
  • content versioning
  • identifiers
  • transfer of
    content between systems
  • filesystems
  • packaging/aggregation/structure of "digital objects"
  • workflow management
  • archiving/archival
    storage
  • metadata
    standards/vocabularies/linked data
  • access/discovery/search systems (www, REST, OpenSearch)
  • interoperability/APIs
  • access
    control/rights/authn/authz
  • failures (as well as successes)

How do I get there?

See this page for more information on directions, parking, public transportation, etc


What's the conference hashtag?

Feel free to use "CURATEcamp" as the tag for this event. Tweets are being archived. We encourage all attendees to share camp materials -- be they photos, links, slides, blog posts, tweets -- widely via this hashtag.




Any other backchannels?

We have an IRC channel called "CURATEcamp" set up on Freenode.

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