Cocuration

Cocuration is a collaborative process in which multiple curators share the authority and responsibility for selecting, organizing, and presenting content or collections. It often occurs across institutions, communities, or platforms, and can involve different expertise and perspectives to expand scope and relevance.

In practice, cocuration appears in museums and libraries with joint exhibitions; in digital media with collaborative playlists or reading lists; in data science and research with shared data curation for reproducible results; and in open knowledge projects where volunteers contribute to metadata, tagging, and annotation.

Common workflows include ideation, item selection, annotation and metadata enrichment, categorization, and presentation, followed by ongoing maintenance. Governance models emphasize attribution, licensing, decision rights, and conflict resolution. Tools may support versioning, provenance tracking, and discussion threads.

Benefits include incorporating diverse viewpoints, distributing workload, and improving coverage and resilience of a collection. Challenges include coordinating activities, balancing competing criteria, ensuring quality control, maintaining consistent metadata, and addressing biases or unequal participation.

Cocuration is related to curation and co-creation, and intersects with crowdsourcing and participatory design. It seeks to combine expertise and community input to produce curated resources that remain current and contextually relevant.