“Curation is using your expertise in a field to gather great content around a specific theme and present that content in a way that will educate others.”

Living in the information age actually means that our economy, and your ability to succeed and thrive in your lifetime are increasingly connected to your ability to manage and efficiently deal with information.

Today, your success and opportunities are not determined anymore by your physical force or by what you physically own, but by:

what you know,
how skilled you are in finding and managing the information you need
who is in your network of contacts.

Unless someone verifies, organizes and curates an information resource, it has little value because it is disconnected from other relevant resources in the same information space. There’s no context.

Curation provides context to any information item, value and a specific perspective and story to look and appreciate it.

curation purpose and role is both to give value and context to quality information resources by identifying, preserving and organizing them in ways that they can be discovered and appreciated by others as well as to help an audience better understand, make sense, explore and comprehend a specific topic by providing it with the best resources available and a guiding viewpoint through which to navigate them.

When I looked closely at why some people spontaneously curate content it did strike me that most of them do not curate their stuff for the direct purpose to save time, to appear more authoritative or to gain more customers. They curate their resources because they can produce better and more satisfying results for themselves, and when they share them, they can automatically extend these benefits to their customers, contacts, friends.

They curate because they care.

Information curators are personally interested in what they do, and curating is the only reliable mean they have to deeply learn about their resources, to vet bad ones, to uncover true gems and to organize them in ways that allows them to find, pinpoint and to share important, unique ones, easily among thousands of other ones.

They curate because it is useful for them, and because when they share their curated collections they can help other people as well.

Content curation is a natural solution to a natural phenomenon: resource abundance.

Curation helps you save time by providing easy and organized access to information and resources otherwise difficult to find and verify.

Curation requires vetting, verification, resource-finding, providing a viewpoint and an ability to synthesize and illustrate what is of value in what is presented, while crediting systematically your sources.

1. The desire to “take care” of an information space, to organize it, and make it easy for others to extract immediate value from it.

2. The desire to share and inform, to educate, to entertain a specific audience.

Such desire is generally motivated by a will to help, support, and cultivate a community of people interested in the same topic.

7. The will to create something meaningful, of lasting value, even if for a limited amount of interested people.

Public, non-commercial digital curation provides a social good, a commons that everyone can benefit from.

“Curation’s purpose is to identify and preserve what is important and then share that knowledge back with society.”

Curators help themselves and others by bringing to light the very best of what they have discovered, vetted and added value to.

“…the art of curation isn’t about the individual pieces of content, but about how these pieces fit together, what story they tell by being placed next to each other, and what statement the context they create makes about culture and the world at large.”

“Great curation is also about pattern-recognition — seeing various pieces of culture and spotting similarities across them that paint a cohesive picture of a larger trend.”