The Ibadan/Liverpool Digital Curation Curriculum Review Project was undertaken in order to formally and thoroughly benchmark the teaching of digital curation in the archival education programmes at the University of Liverpool, UK and the University of Ibadan, Nigeria.
The project assessed whether digital curation skills and knowledge were being taught, practised and/or tested by the programmes. As a result, the project team were able to identify skill and knowledge areas where teaching materials could be shared between the universities to improve and augment both courses. For example, Liverpool was able to share some of its teaching resources about subject knowledge, change management, and communication and advocacy; Ibadan, on the other hand, shared resources about data skills and structures as well as information ethics. Further areas were identified where new materials needed to be developed in order to teach digital curation skills in more depth - these included knowledge of file types, applications and systems, considering the energy consumption and carbon footprint of digital curation activity, and managing audit and certification and resource management.
The project methodology was developed from the DigCurV Curriculum Framework. Amatrix was created which incorporated the four teachable domains outlined in DigCurV: Knowledge and Intellectual Abilities (KIA), Personal Qualities (PQ), Professional Conduct(PC), and Management and Quality Assurance (MQA). The matrix also incorporated the two other key aspects of the DigCurV framework: identification of the need for different levels of skill or knowledge at different levels of digital curation practice, and how these levels of skill relate to the expected requirements for digital curation practitioners, managers and executives. The project team assessed the Ibadan and Liverpool curricula in a two-week working meeting at the University of Liverpool using these defined requirements as a structured way to measure the type and level of digital curation which is taught to students in the archival education programmes.
The project team did not expect to see all of the skills or competency levels represented in the curricula, but hoped to find evidence of teaching in each skill set to the level defined by the framework as being appropriate to the Practitioner and/orManager level of competency.
This project was conducted with support from the Fund for the International Development of Archives (FIDA) in line with the broad aims of the International Council on Archives’ Africa Archives (FIDA) in line with the broad aims of the International Council on Archives’ Africa Programme to support archival education.
This project is the first to build on the principles set out in the DigCurV framework and develop a practical tool that universities and other educational institutions and initiatives canuse to gauge the strength of their digital curation teaching. It was conceived with the aim offilling a gap in current curricula to better prepare students for digital curation work in theircareers. The DigCurV framework is widely recognised as a statement of the required knowledge in this area, so aiming to match teaching with the elements of the framework was an effective way of meeting student's needs.
Both the University of Liverpool and the University of Ibadan have revised their teaching on the basis of our findings: these revisions will benefit the students of both programmes with a more thorough grounding in digital curation and preservation skills and knowledge base.
The project will also benefit students and institutions around the world who will be able to use our assessment technique as a template that offers clarity of thinking about the specific types of knowledge and practical skills - from subject knowledge to the ability to become managers and leaders in the field - which students will need to progress in their careers indigital curation and drive forward the field as a whole.
The tool developed as part of the project will eventually be made available on the ICA website, which means that it will be able to benefit any digital preservation and/or curation course across the globe. A case study of the project is currently being considered for publication. It will provide anexemplar of the versatility of the tool in different educational, institutional and national settings and encourage its further use. We hope that the tool will be able to be improved and adapted by ongoing discussion and evaluation with archivists and digital curation colleagues across the world.