The Digital Curation for Information Professionals (DCIP) Non-Credit Certificate Program is designed for individuals currently in the library, archives, or digital curation field or planning to enter it but wish to enhance their digital skills.

This program consists of three fully online and asynchronous courses. Participants must complete all three courses to receive a Certificate of Completion. The total cost for all three courses is $4,010.

Courses

·  January 8–February 16, Introduction to Digital Curation (6 weeks): In this 6-week introductory course, students will learn the principles for the design and implementation of long-term curation of digital data and information assets, including born-digital and digitized assets. Students will work to build a foundational framework for analyzing the technical, practical, ethical, economic, legal, social, and political factors affecting digital curation decisions.

·  February 26–May 17, Tools and Software for Digital Curation (12 weeks): This 12-week course provides ample hands-on experience in testing the application of digital curation principles in specific settings. Students will discuss the characteristics, representation, conversion, and preservation of digital objects, and work to plan for sustainability, risk mitigation, and disaster recovery. Multiple tools and software will be utilized throughout the course.

·  May 27–August 16, Implementing Digital Curation in the Workplace (12 weeks):  This final 12-week capstone course provides students with an opportunity to understand the application of digital curation principles and techniques first-hand in an institutional program setting. Students who take this course will address one or more aspects of digital curation in their own organization through a project, focusing on an aspect of digital curation: design and implementation for long-term digital curation of a discrete collection; application of technologies and standards for digitization, description, and preservation of digital assets; or implementation of strategies to provide access to a digital collection.

Project Examples

Ashley Gosselar (2022) used her capstone project to analyze the text of all of the finding aids from the University of Chicago Library’s Hanna Holborn Gray Special Collections Research Center with the goal to identify and prioritize finding aids for reparative description. Her project demonstrates that computational thinking can be applied to the planning stages of reparative description work. She reported her methodology and results in a Jupyter Notebook, which you can view here.

Click here to see additional examples of capstone projects from previous cohorts, available in a dropdown menu.

Registration

To register, please visit UMD INFO's Open Learning page. Registration for the first course will be open until the first day of class, January 8, 2024 There is no application process for this certificate. If you have questions or concerns about the skills or background to be successful in this program, please contact ischooldcip@umd.edu or the certificate’s director, Dr. Richard Marciano (marciano@umd.edu).