Rosenbaum - Are You A Curator?

Y ouve purchased this book or its been given to you, so it would be easy to assume that youve already made the jump and decided that you want to be a curator. However, not so fast. Lets walk you through a simple checklist of curator attributes and see if you fit the bill.

Are you a maker?

Do you create content of some sort either in short or long form? Are you a writer, poet, painter, songwriter, composer, sculptor, journalist, blogger or author? If the answer is yes, then bravo youve got one of the critical things that all curators need. A voice. A passion to create. To find unusual linkage and eye-opening connections.

Curation is the art of creating something new, coherent and meaningful out of an abundance of related information and ideas. The reason why theres no such thing as machine curation or algorithmic curation is that curation, at its core is an artistic and a human endeavor. So, if you see curation as an extension or expansion of your creative voice, then youre in the right place.

Are you a leader?

Curation is the art of standing in the front of the room and telling an audience to follow you. You need to be bold, charismatic, fearless and willing to take risks and make mistakes. Great curators will see around corners, embrace and expose unusual and unexpected themes and sources, and make bold predictions about their passions and beliefs. Theres little room for timid, cautious, slow moving curators. The Web operates in real time and curators need to promise their fans and followers that theyll burn the midnight oil to find whats new and notable and get it validated, curated, contextualized and published first.

Do you thrive and explore across media boundaries? The ideal curator is multi-disciplinary, willing to forage for ideas and wisdom in tweets, Tumblr posts, LinkedIn pages, Flickr images, Slideshare accounts, Facebook posts, G+ Groups and the legion of emerging voices and sources. The tools are ever changing. The nature of the ideas and the shape of their containers is morphing daily. Vine and Instagram videos have empowered a whole new class of creators. Pinterest boards are now part of the curatorial mix. YouTube, Vimeo and Metacafe are the tip of the video iceberg.

Your fans and friends dont have the time or tools to go spelunking for content in the dark and unexplored corners of the Internet. If theyve chosen you as their curator of choice, then theyve deputized you to go exploring for them. That means always being hungry for whats next and whats new, wherever it may reside.

Are you a list maker?

curators are more than hunter/gatherers. They are organizers. They bring order to chaos by creating a framework and then presenting their curated output in a coherent and logical frame. If youve found a thousand potential Editorial elements for a curated page on a sporting event, breaking news story or complex medical or social subject, then the art of honing it down to a digestible, coherent arrangement of Editorial elements is often painfully difficult.

In many ways, the old world of physical limitations, such as the pages in The New York Times or the 3o minutes of The Evening News, made the need to edit and make brutal cuts a requirement. The limits of that world demanded a firm Editorial hand, but, in the new digital world, its easy to say why not let the audience have all of it? Thats a weak excuse and the mark of a curator who is simply a collector of digital bits. The art is in the edit, cutting the avalanche of information into a focused, meaty, revealing curated collection.