The "digital curation" concept is still evolving. In "Digital Curation and Trusted Repositories: Steps Toward Success," Christopher A. Lee and Helen R. Tibbo define digital curation as follows:

Digital curation involves selection and appraisal by creators and archivists; evolving provision of intellectual access; redundant storage; data transformations; and, for some materials, a commitment to long-term preservation. Digital curation is stewardship that provides for the reproducibility and re-use of authentic digital data and other digital assets. Development of trustworthy and durable digital repositories; principles of sound metadata creation and capture; use of open standards for file formats and data encoding; and the promotion of information management literacy are all essential to the longevity of digital resources and the success of curation efforts. The foundational vision of the DCC is that "long term stewardship of digital assets is the responsibility of everyone in the digital information value chain" and that "the maintenance, usability and survival of digital resources depends on regular planned interventions; care needs to be taken at conception, at creation, during use, and as use transitions to lower levels" (Rusbridge 2005). Digital curation extends far beyond repository control and involves attention to content creators and future users.

Digital preservation is typically regarded as a key subset of digital curation.

The Digital Curation and Preservation Bibliography includes published articles, books, and, technical reports. All included works are in English. The bibliography does not cover conference papers, digital media works (such as MP3 files), editorials, e-mail messages, letters to the editor, news articles, presentation slides or transcripts, unpublished e-prints, or weblog postings.

Most sources have been published between 2000 and the present; however, a limited number of key sources published prior to 2000 are also included. Where possible, links are provided to e-prints in disciplinary archives and institutional repositories for published articles. Note that e-prints and published articles may not be identical.

In cases where the publisher frequently changes journal URLs with providing public notification or URL redirection, included URLs are to the publisher's domain, not to individual articles.

Digital curation intersects with a variety of broader topics, such as copyright, digital repositories, digitization, digital libraries, and metadata. These topics are treated in more depth in other Digital Scholarship bibliographies, such as the Institutional Repository Bibliography, the Open Access Bibliography: Liberating Scholarly Literature with E-Prints and Open Access Journals, and the Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography.