Michael Lesk
Is there such a thing as too much data? If not, who is going to be responsible for selecting what we keep? There is only starting to be a profession of data curation. Data curation will need at least three skills: expertise from library, archive and museum studies about choosing, preserving and explaining to users; expertise from computer science and engineering about data processing, data exploration and data storage methods; and expertise from the subject area of the material, so as to know what the data means, where it came from, and what its significance is. Will we do this work with a committee, or train one person to do everything; and if the latter, is that person likely to start from the library, computing, or subject domain?
