Susan Chavez is a blogger for TechSoup's Online Community team.

Technology has made it easier than ever to access a wide range of information, but what’s the best way to sort through it all? The best advice is to take a tip from libraries and museums and curate all that information. Last month, TechSoup and TechSoup Romania's hourlong tweet chat explored content curation and the best tools for it.

What Is Content Curation?

Tweet chat participants were in near agreement in their definition of content curation: judicious selection of information to tell a story. Curating content requires deciding what to gather, filtering and organizing information, and finding the common threads to present a story. Sometimes curation means culling content and making connections not easily seen to present a unique narrative. Audience matters, and being mindful of what your community is interested in should inform the curation process. However, curation is not only about what the audience wants but also about finding content that would expand the audience’s horizons. 

The Tools

You may already be using content curation tools if you visit the web on a regular basis. The most basic and commonly used tools include RSS readers, alerts, bookmarking sites, and Twitter lists. The proliferation of social media has paved the way for newer curation tools, many of which organize and display content like an online newsletter or magazine with minor feature differences. For example, Summify measures sentiment and a user’s reading history to highlight content. ScoopIt selects content according to keywords input by the user but also lets the user manually add content. Paper.li installs a button on users' web browsers, which they can click when they find content to add to their newsletter. And Kontribune is a community newsletter that lets the audience add comments or content.

The Human Element

The content and tools are nothing without the curator. The curator decides where and how the content is presented. For example, sharing multimedia content like audio might not present well across some curation tools; in some cases you may need more than one tool. Ultimately, choosing the right tool means choosing the tool that helps connect you with your community. And getting the most out of any tool requires actively using the tools at your disposal - defining the subject and making adjustments along the way, such as adding new keywords and identifying new sources.

For more information on content curation, consider the following resources:

• Beth Kanter's wiki on Content Curation
• Content and Curation for Nonprofits
• The Expanding Universe of Curated Content Delivery Formats
• On Digital Collection Curation - LibGuides at Pennsylvania Digital Collections
• Building Thought Leadership through Content Curation
• NetSquared Think Tank: Curating Content