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Data curation is defined as “the active and ongoing management of data through its lifecycle of interest and usefulness to scholarship, science, and education.” (GSLIS) The volume of scientific data is growing exponentially across all scientific disciplines. This phenomenon has been termed the “data deluge.” The data deluge is now a fundamental characteristic of e-science and “big science,” especially in disciplines such as physics, astronomy, and earth and atmospheric sciences. Moreover, stakeholders are beginning to recognize the value in sharing data assets with each other and in curation of data for re-use over the long term. Competent information professionals are needed to curate this data for future research and education requirements.

What this means for us in libraries is that we shouldn't be thinking that linked data will replace bibliographic data. It will encode the aspects of bibliographic data that will give us the most and the best links.

Of course, they could look for a username that sounds like you in the list of 8 million LinkedIn and EHarmony logins and then just use the password published there, or the ones posted following the hack of 77 million user accounts at Sony or the 130 million credit-card accounts taken from the clearinghouse that processes your credit card payments, or tens of thousands lost by a New York electric utility or the California government services agency you thought was unquestionably trustworthy or the 24 million emails and user names swiped from Zappos or almost anywhere else.

you should use a different highly secure password at every site you use.

That way, no matter what web-site login database is breached next, your loss can be limited to only the information (or money) on that one site,

Wikidata is a free knowledge base that can be read and edited by humans and machines alike. It is for data what Wikimedia Commons is for media files: it centralizes access and management of structured data, such as interwiki references and statistical information. Wikidata contains data in all languages for which there are Wikimedia projects

The Walters is a museum that’s free to the public, and to be public these days is to be on the Internet. Therefore to be a public museum your digital data should be free. And the great thing about digital data, particularly of historic collections, is that they’re the greatest advert that these collections have. So: Why on Earth would you limit how people can use them? The digital data is not a threat to the real data, it’s just an advertisement that only increases the aura of the original, so there just doesn’t seem to be any point in putting restrictions on the data.

Institutions with special collections, particularly museums — libraries perhaps less so — want to improve their brand and raise visitorship. One way in which they can do that is through advertising. And what better way to advertise than by making instantly available, or as available as possible, images of their collections? Because that’s how they get known.

However, the bill goes much further, permitting ISPs to funnel private communications and related information back to the government without adequate privacy protections and controls. The bill does not specify which agencies ISPs could disclose customer data to, but the structure and incentives in the bill raise a very real possibility that the National Security Agency or the DOD’s Cybercommand would be the primary recipient.

And what comes through loud and clear is that the Rogers-Ruppersberger CISPA bill will allow for much greater information sharing of companies sending private communication data to the government -- including the NSA, who has been trying very, very hard to get this data, not for cybersecurity reasons, but to spy on people.

Between 2006 and 2010, demand for processing cycles (MIPS, servers and the like) has slowly approached an 18 erpcent annual growth rate in the big banks. Storage, by the way, has hit 45 percent per year -- the advent of Big Data is here -- and although the unit cost of storage is still dropping, storage cost pools around the financial industry are expanding out of control. The growth phenomenon is now exacerbated by market conditions, and Moore's Law just isn't enough.

Taking a step back, you will likely ask, "How can this be true?" The answer involves yet another "law" -- actually, a paradox observed in the late 1800s -- "Jevons paradox," which states:Technological progress that increases the efficiency with which a resource is used tends to increase (rather than decrease) the rate of consumption of that resource. William Stanley Jevons developed this hypothesis in 1865, based on his observations of coal consumption vis-à-vis the technology advances designed to improve the efficiency of coal usage. It was his argument that these improvements alone could not be relied on to reduce consumption; rather, they would lead to increased consumption -- and he was right. Today we talk about elastic computing; in 1865 Jevons focused on "elastic coal" – well, at least the demand was elastic.

So the aforementioned growth in demand (passing the 20 percent mark per year) is actually fueled in part by the inherent efficiencies created by Moore's Law. Through 2010 we were in the Moore's Law zone of managing IT costs downward. Now we are a new world governed by the effects noted by Jevons.