Thing 8 Digital Curation
Curation Situations: Let us count the ways July 5, 2017 By Joyce Valenza
I think that Joyce Valenza has some good ideas on the purpose of curating is collaboration as well as just putting a digital collection together. We build with our teachers that enables our students build knowledge. We need diverse collections that will also allow our students to become curators themselves, which is a integral part of the AASL Standards. Valenza and others have also talked about using OER Sources into our curations.
Are you a curator or a dumper? by Jennifer Gonzalez made me laugh because I know I do it and because we are librarians we want to share relevant information to others but often we fall short by “dumping” to much on a person and they immediately go into information overload because people can only process small chunks at a time.
My own thoughts on the Curator or Dumper…
This information overload is probably an issue that librarians cultivate , don’t hate me yet, but it’s just part of who we are. If you ask me about one book to read; you will hear about 10 books and all the ways I can book talk them to you. Ask me about why cows lay down when bad weather is coming and I will call Cornell Cooperative Extension, give you my neighbors phone nume who is actually a farmer as well as 13 books on Fact or Fiction in the animal industry, and it won’t stop there. I will email you peer reviewed articles and send you some incredible links to NOAA and actually will call my friend Bob at the news station who is a meteorologist and ask him about his point of view. By this time the person I am giving this information has spun their head around twice in both directions, asked for duct tape for my mouth and stared at me as if I really gave them too much information (like I would actually do that). Basically it comes down to asking questions about the specific information needs of a person and going from there with a plan to meet only those needs i order to curate efficiently. Don’t feel bad about being an information dumper; there are programs to change that. We can become super curators meeting the intellectual, emotional and amusing needs of our patrons.
Curation Tools
I tried Symbaloo but it would not be readily used by my students. I tried it before as a curation tool and it is only okay. I signed up for it again and for me it is too cluttered. I work better without having lots of things on my screen at one time. I could see some of my students using it to create their own resource lists to share with other students. Teaching curation is a skill that the students do need to learn. I would show my students two or three curation sites and let them choose But I am moving on in search of other tools.
I use Smore online flyer to share information to my students and one for my faculty. I limit how much information I put in it and I try to keep the focus on one or two topics. This seems to work well especially when I have something new such as Follett OneSearch to teach people.
The last program that I will try is elink.io which seems to be a cross between Smore online flyer and Google sites. This is a great Chrome Extension. When I needed to save a web page for elinkio I simply clicked the button and it also gave me opportunities to take a screenshot or to use an existing image for the web page. This can also be sent as a newsletter. I curated a page for LGBTQ+ students. I tried to include different media formats, eBooks and books and used local authors and people to help make connections for LGBTQ+.. I think I could easily teach elink to my students when they are collaborating on projects and because there needs to be more than just a works cited page for information. This curation and sharing will help my students find more meaningful information because they will be sharing it with each other whereas a works cited page is usually just seen by the teacher.
Here is my example of using elink.io
LGBTQ+
neednewname 