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How many times have you tried to check a quick fact online and then lost an hour following links and checking unhelpful websites? The proliferation of paid search results and content mills makes it difficult to find what you want. Like traditional museum and gallery curators, digital curators acquire useful works and artifacts that fit into their collections. Influential tech evangelist Robert Scoble has said that content curation will be an essential 21st century digital skill.
An aggregator filters through the tons of content produced on the web and brings it together for you. Aggregators are the first line of defense against the white noise of the internet. They are helpful, but usually aren't very smart. If you are curating a list on tablet pc technology then the aggregator would probably also return results from archeology stories about stone tablets being discovered and similar uses of the word.
There are several ways to aggregate content. Paid services like GigaAlert and free services like Google Alert automatically track and monitor the web and alert you when something new has been posted that matches your search criteria. Most websites and blogs have RSS and Atom feeds, and you can use RSS readers, Google Reader, or most email clients to read posts from the site when they are updated. There are even social media aggregators that monitor Facebook, Twitter, and other social networks. Some content curation tools have built in aggregators (more on this in the next task). In addition to Google News, there are also many curated lists of news aggregators and tools.
Where will most of your content come from: news sites, blogs, content producer's websites, social media, academic journal databases?
This intro on aggregators assumes that you're watching for up and coming content, whereas I'd be wanting to look for a mix of archived and new content. It could be anywhere, but mostly like in blogs and articles from academics studying the field, on museum and heritage institutional websites and maybe some specialist online networks.
I think the best route to take there would be specialized search engines like searchedu.com and infomine --- databases of academic journals like JSTOR are also great resources, they are in the process of making a lot of older material available for free, and after finding the names of authors, you can search for them on the internet and see if anyone is mentioning them or if they have a blog. (I hope this is at least a little helpful, if you have any other suggestions please share- thanks!)
Thank you for those tips. I'd not thought to use either of those, though I'd heard of infomine.
I usually use built in aggregators, but I also set Google Alerts for some of my favorite topics, and use databases of academic journals. While most databases are subscription only or for students of subscribing universities, JSTOR has recently released a lot of back issue content for free if you sign up for an account, Justia and lexisOne has free Supreme Court opinions and case law.
Have a few Google alerts set, but have found that on less well known websites, the alert can take a couple of days to appear in my inbox, as the Google crawler has to come across it (I guess).
Will need to check out the others that you list above.
Have used JSTOR for some past copies of the Irish Arts Review.
Fred.
