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Since its creation nearly a decade ago, the Digital Curation Centre (DCC) Curation Lifecycle Model has become the quintessential framework for understanding digital curation. Organizations and consortia around the world have used the DCC Curation Lifecycle Model as a tool to ensure that all the necessary stages of digital curation are undertaken, to define roles and responsibilities, and to build a framework of standards and technologies for digital curation. Yet, research on the application of the model to large-scale digitization projects as a way of understanding their efforts at digital curation is scant. This paper reports on findings of a qualitative case study analysis of Indiana University Bloomington’s multi-million-dollar Media Digitization and Preservation Initiative (MDPI), employing the DCC Curation Lifecycle Model as a lens for examining the scope and effectiveness of its digital curation efforts. Findings underscore the success of MDPI in performing digital curation by illustrating the ways it implements each of the model’s components. Implications for the application of the DCC Curation Lifecycle Model in understanding digital curation for mass digitization projects are discussed as well as directions for future research.

The paper describes two related research projects concerning the sculptural decoration of a well-known classical Greek monument, the temple of Zeus at Olympia. Both projects are based on the same dataset, i.e. the 3D scans obtained from the original pieces of marble sculpture, but they are used for two completely different purposes. In the first section, a summary is given of the results concerning the virtual 3D reconstruction of the east pediment, the second part describes another research question, the identity of the so-called Olympia master and a new analytical method, which makes use of the possibilities offered by the digital datasets and may open up new perspectives for the traditional art historical analysis. Beside the re-using and re-purposing of the raw data, the 3D models are not the final output of the project, but they are used to enhance our knowledge in a new way, which would be hardly feasible with traditional methods.