The University of Maine is poised to launch an innovative graduate program in digital curation, beginning September 2012. The online, 18-credit curriculum aims to train anyone who works with digitized or born-digital items to make them accessible and meaningful to present and future generations.
The U-Me Digital Curation program is a two-year graduate certificate, taught online, intended for those working in museums, archives, artist studios, government offices, and anywhere that people need to manage digital files. The program walks students through the phases of managing digitized or born-digital artifacts, including acquisition, representation, access, and preservation.
For a photo archivist, for example, these courses would answer questions like how to scan analog photos into a database, how to add metadata to make them searchable online, and how to cope with the rapid obsolescence of the software and hardware used to catalogue them.
Although the certificate is designed to be completed in two years, part-time students may choose to spread the 18 credits (6 courses) over a longer period. To make things easier for students currently working in collecting institutions, we have designed the final course as an internship that may take place in the student’s own workplace.
We are keeping up-to-date information about the program, including descriptions of courses and participating faculty, at the Web site DigitalCuration.UMaine.edu. Tuition and fees will be posted soon. The first courses are slated to come online in September 2012.
We are already getting queries from interested students. If you would like more information, please contact Jon Ippolito.