4 Benefits of Content Curation

Back in early 2015 I got hired by a software company specializing in digital content curation. The position required me to engage with clients and learn all facets of the company’s service and product offering. At that time, I was already familiar with a wide array of content platforms hence the learning curve was not so steep.

At first content curation was an interesting proposition which Wikipedia defines with: “… the selection, preservation, maintenance, collection and archiving of digital assets. Digital curation establishes, maintains and adds value to repositories of digital data for present and future use”. I really came to like the company’s core product as well as some the competition’s offering.

On a personal level, the process of content curation really changed the way I look for information on a daily basis. In my opinion engaging in such comes with 4 main benefits:

1. It facilitates information discovery: curation platforms come with a number of algorithms allowing users to discover new content through feed readers and recommendations.
2. It is an easy and efficient way to store and organize your research: historically Internet users would use bookmarks in their browsers to save content they found interesting. Curation platforms go beyond such and allow you to save digital assets such as webpages in repositories that can be consulted later either through navigation or internal search.
3. Sharing content among your peers suddenly becomes easier: if you ever have held a job that was research-intensive (most white-collar jobs in this day and age really) you have faced the pain of sharing content with team members and other stakeholders. If left to their own devices, your colleagues and collaborators would use different means of collecting and sharing content: spreadsheets, email, word processors … you name it . On the other hand content curation platforms offer sophisticated collaboration tools that make information collection and sharing seamless and systematic among your professional cohort.
4. It is fun and encourages you to maintain a research routine: in my opinion this is the most underrated aspect of content curation as a discipline. Today’s world is becoming more and more complex and time is becoming scarcer. There is also the general consensus that the amount of content on the Internet and the workplace is becoming gigantic. Most content curation platforms have some kind of edutainment aspect to them. Such can be visual, peer-review intensive or reward-based with the goal of users sticking to a routine. Furthermore it goes without saying that the systematic, streamlined process of discovering information is a time saver that encourages one to maintain their repository.

In a nutshell this has been my experience thus far: digital content curation has simplified the way I research, collect and share information. I would be very interested to know your opinion on the matter, so feel free to drop a comment or write me directly.

This article was originally published on LinkedIn.