# Understanding How GitHub Supports
## 4 Results
### The Emerging Role of Curation Repositories
#### 4.2.1 The Purposes of Curation Repositories  
First, we investigated the contents of curation repositories. As shown in Figure 1, the content of a curation repository is usually a list of curated items of various types, grouped into a set of categories. We coded the topic of each curation repository and the types of curated items and examined the provenance of the curated items. Overall, 47 of the 49 curation repositories included resources about a topic in the technology industry, one was about curating taco recipes, and one was about curating images. The Quality Indicators of Curated Contents  
We observed that the curation repositories usually include quality indicators in the repository name, description, or README.md file. Out of 49 projects, 27 contained quality indicators, including words or phrases like \"awesome\" (15 repositories), \"must-watch\" or \"must-read\" (3 repositories), \"good\" (3 repositories), \"useful\" (2 repositories), and \"rock your world\", \"most influential\", \"favorite\", \"cool\" (1 repository each). Some curation repositories also included a very specific definition of the quality of their contents, such as:  
_\"An awesome package is one that is mature (not recently released), is well maintained, has a good amount of users, has good documentation, follows the best practices, and whose latest release is less than one year old. Axesome Django packages and projects are the ones that inspire and serve as examples.\"--awesome-django_ ([[https://github.com/rosarior/awesome-django](https://github.com/rosarior/awesome-django)]([https://github.com/rosarior/awesome-django](https://github.com/rosarior/awesome-django)))  
Types of Curated Items  
Then, we followed the hyperlinks of each curation repository and recorded the type of resource it directed to. The most common types of curated resources were articles and software projects. The complete types of resources and the associated number of curation repositories that included that type of resources is presented in Table 2.  
Following [PERSON] et al. 's (2014) framework for identifying the sources of curated content [PERSON] et al. 's (2014), we examined the sources of the curated items in each curation repository. We coded the repositories using the following scheme: the repositories with more than 75% contents from GitHub were coded as internal curation, those with less than 25% contents from GitHub as external curation, and the rest was coded as hybrid curation. Around 30% of the curation repositories engaged in internal curation for which the contents mostly came from within GitHub. In 61.2% of the curation repositories, the majority of the curated items came from external resources, which was originated outside of the GitHub realm (Table 3). \begin{table}
\begin{tabular}{c c c c} \hline \hline
**Type of Resources** & **\#** & **Type of Resources** & **\#** \\ \hline Articles & 31 & Courses & 6 \\ Software projects & 30 & Conferences & 4 \\ Websites & 24 & Audio & 4 \\ Books & 20 & Microblogs & 4 \\ Video & 12 & Q\&As & 4 \\ Software & 11 & People & 3 \\ Blogs & 9 & Research Papers & 3 \\ \hline \hline \end{tabular}
\end{table} 
Table 2: Types of curated resources. As seen in Figure 1, a section contains a themed list of items, which notes the resource name, link, and description. We further coded item description as follows: (1) if the curated list contained nothing except the name of the resources and hyperlink, it was coded as \"No description\"; (2) if most items (more than 70 percent) of the list had a one- or two-sentence description, it was coded as \"Simple description\"; (3) if most items (more than 70 percent) of the list had a description which the was either structured or longer than two sentences, it was coded as \"Rich description\" (Table 4). Around 60% of the curation repositories had some descriptions for each curated item, and 40% had no description at all. This showed the varying of formatting for the curated lists and a lack of standardization.