The origins of curation can be traced back to the start of human information recording, and since then we’ve been shifting, selecting, organising and presenting information to give it meaning, identify its relevance and clarify its context.

Tim Berners-Lee, (the inventor of the World Wide Web), included in his principle functions of the internet that is should:

Allow anyone to access any type of document
Allow everyone to disseminate their own documents
Allow everyone to organise the entire collection of documents

Digital curation is the starting point for everyone to begin, as Berners-Lee intended, to take control of the vast amount of digital content available and organise it into meaningful collections.

Good’s work showed just how powerful digital curation could be for generating social engagement and discussion.

In his book “Here comes everybody”, Clay Shirky diagnosed that the problem was “not information overload, but filter failure”.

Shirky’s research showed that this type of tagging was actually making the situation worse, as so much relevant information was identified, individuals didn’t feel able to pay attention to it all, and ended up not paying attention to it at all!

Situational Overload:  Think of this as being like the needle in a haystack problem.  You need a piece (the needle) of information quickly, and that piece you need is buried in a lot of other pieces of information (the haystack).

Ambient Overload: Think of this as not searching for a needle in a haystack of information, but instead  being faced with a haystack sized pile of needles that you want to engage with.

Ambient overload happens because there is so much information that we like and we want, and as the filters continue to get smarter they are providing us with   more and more of what we want.

if you follow his analogy of food being information, when you are looking for a satisfying meal, the first thing you look for is the type of restaurant you want to go to and the quality of food you are after.

Digital curation forms an intermediate layer between the search engine (or other sources of information) and the information consumer, to help when the search engine return is no longer enough.

For learners, already overwhelmed by business information, good use of digital curation can help them find relevant and useful learning content easily, supporting them just in time, or just in case.