I’ve been fascinated to watch a development at my former employer (the California Digital Library), called Curation Micro Services. The idea is simple, and is best explained by the introductory text from their web site:
Micro-services are an approach to digital curation based on devolving curation functions into a set of independent, but interoperable, services that embody curation values and strategies. Since each of the services is small and self-contained, they are collectively easier to develop, deploy, maintain, and enhance. Equally as important, they are more easily replaced when they have outlived their usefulness. Although the individual services are narrowly scoped, the complex function needed for effective curation emerges from the strategic combination of individual services.
In other words, digital curation is seen as an open ecosystem rather than a rigid, self-contained environment. Services that have discreet, limited roles can be combined in a variety of different ways to perform different workflows and sets of tasks. Should one piece need replacing, the discrete nature of it’s purpose shields the rest of the infrastructure from breakage. Updates can be handled simply and incrementally rather than systemically.
This immediately strikes me as eminently sensible on a number of fronts. Gone are the heavyweight systems that provide content management services when really filesystem storage is in many cases safer, easier, and more transparent. Gone are the dependencies that require updates to happen systemically instead of incrementally. Gone is the inflexibility of a silo system where all of the code is of a piece.
It’s important to understand the completely different perspective this brings to digital preservation, which is at least partly expressed by the diagram I lifted from the document UC3 Curation Foundations. I’m convinced this is the new face of digital preservation, and it’s being defined right now by a group of people — not just the University of California — who believe in it too.
They will be gathering soon at the Curation Technology Camp, or CURATECamp for short, which is an “unconference” at the University of California, Berkeley, August 16-17, 2010. If digital preservation…uh…curation is your bag, I’d be there.
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It’s clearly gathering momentum, and I do find the micro services approach interesting. But I can’t help wondering how they selected the micros services. They seem a bit, well… random (eg pair-trees). Shouldn’t they in fact be decomposed from some model of curation. But maybe they are in the document you reference… looks better than arguments I’ve seen before. Perhaps I should stop moaning and go read it more carefully…
[...] Roy Tennant (OCLC) on curation micro-services [...]