In this instance the curator should be the Subject Matter Expert (SME). What it sounds like is that the SME has lost touch, they’re no longer a SME. Perhaps you could argue that a SME doesn’t work to enhance the user experience but I don’t think the two ideas are mutually exclusive, in fact I’d say that’s the job of a good SME.

So, while the soccer analogy is nice, I’d take it further. Only one person gets to touch the ball with their hands. Right? And you surely have players you most want to kick that shot, or to be the one to take a penalty kick. A curator (SME) can still be valuable.

Not everyone can be skilled at curation. Should you have more than one person who can do it? Sure. Should that person take pointers from the SME (the captain, the on-field coach)? Yes. It can be a team, but I still believe it should stem from a point of judgement. That doesn’t mean a dictatorship, but there is an arbiter.

When I read something like this I worry that we’re marginalizing SMEs. That suddenly everyone can be a SME! (“I read something on the Internet today and so I think we should …”) Perhaps I’m over-reacting but I still want people who are great at just a few things, rather then people who are okay at a lot of things.

Second, using ‘curation’ forces our audience to make a leap from what they know of the word to a new context. I’m not sure we can ‘commandeer’ the word as you suggest, Jared, and get traction. Aren’t we supposed to be making things easy for users, using terms they already understand, etc.? I don’t want to have to over-explain a word to clients. It feels like work.

Last, using ‘curation’ as many think we should, smacks of insecurity to me — looking for a high-toned expression to add luster to the sometimes ignored or denigrated role of the content strategist. I’m content to think of myself as the deli guy.

Thanks for replying to my post.

I completely get where you’re coming from. Words do matter and the potential for confusion is great.

I started in the computer industry at a time when the world Hacker was a good thing. It was a badge of honor amongst many programmers. Today, the word is almost always sinister, referring to people who like to destroy more than create.

But what’s interesting is that the word itself didn’t change. It was the behaviors of the people labeled with the word that changed.

I think the same is true for curation. If we want it to mean something that is about doing, then that’s how we use it. The more people who use it that way, and use it consistently, the more the world will associate the word with those behaviors.

So, I think we’re at a good point here. We can commandeer the word and start using it for our own nefarious purposes—to make the world of content a better place.

Further to what you’ve included here, the reason I struggle with the term in a web context is that to me it just doesn’t make a lot of sense. My point about museum curators is that their role isn’t to be completely visitor/user focused; in non-commercial museum settings, I’ve yet to meet a curator who creates exhibitions primarily based on what visitors think they want to see. They follow threads and put together exhibitions for a variety of reasons such as to provoke and question culture, history, the status quo, what have you. To be clear, I think that the role of the museum curator should be fairly academic and generally, they should leave the marketing and visitor services roles to other people who are better suited to them. So I don’t so much have issues with the role, so much as I understand its limitations.

I like the idea of language evolving and I have no problem with a word such as curation being appropriated outside of the museum community but I can’t help but feel like it’s been rendered a bit meaningless by its over-application. For example, I belong to an online community called Pinterest, which is actually a very nifty little web app. Every time I create a new board or “pin” a new image to the site, it says “This board curated by Amy Thibodeau.” In this context, I am just Googling, finding images I like and then grouping them together on a visual board – surely there’s more to curation than that? This happens a lot with Tumblr too. Does reblogging really constitute curation? I don’t think it does, though many sites would disagree and use the word to describe what they are doing.

Although I haven’t entirely made a decision about curation/curator in the context of the web, if I had to sum up my biggest issue it’s that it doesn’t mean much; it’s more about title and less about ‘doing’. This isn’t true in the museum world because of decades of use and the credentials associated with the position. In the web, it’s slapped onto so many things that it loses its meaning. And any time this happens my worry is that clients will be confused. In content strategy, words matter. They matter a lot.