Storage for physical collections can require hugely different amounts of space – everything from a huge barn for classic cars to a small box for a collection of tiny sea shells. In my case, the range is from a bookcase full of 120 mystery books to a couple of folders for a few hundred chocolate wrappers. However, it seems that whatever is collected, owners often run out of space as the collection expands. In fact, the space that is available often dictates how much is collected and how it is stored. For example, our physical photo collection is stored in standard slip-in photo albums around 25cm high. I elected to stick to this size because some of the bigger photo albums we used to have simply wouldn’t fit on the shelves of a standard bookcase. Using this standard size, the whole collection of over fifty albums sits together on a bookcase in the lounge. Physical photos that were bigger than about 20cm high are held in a folder in the loft and represented in the albums by scanned versions reduced in size. In a similar vein, the adjustable shelving in my study bookcases is set to ensure the maximum number of shelves given that just one shelf is high enough for particularly tall books; and the books are ordered to enable the tall books to sit on those high shelves. In yet another example, one of the shelves in my study tallboy wasn’t high enough to take the folders I was keeping my postmark collection in, so I sought out some ring binders that would fit and moved my postmark collection into them.

Such space constraints are probably the main drivers for where and how physical collections are stored. However, two other factors do come into play. The first is a desire to keep all objects in a collection together and in some kind of order. Hence, for my mystery book collection, I have the books ordered roughly by topic – Atlantis, Egypt, Bible, Mayans, Freemasonry etc. – whereas my Personal book collection is ordered by author and date of publication within author. The other factor is access; I want to be able to get to my collections as quickly and as easily as possible. Hence, I try to keep most of my collections in the bookcases and tallboy in my study; and just about all of my available space is used.

The storage of the digital versions of my collections is not nearly as constrained. True, there has been a problem in the past about available space, but I haven’t been bothered by this since I bought my current laptop in 2018 with a 1 Tb Solid State drive. The items to be stored are all files, and they are all stored within the standard hierarchical Windows folder system. The files are of various types and sizes but that doesn’t really make much difference. It is a simple matter to create and delete folders and to move files from folder to folder at will. I can choose to keep several collections together in a single higher-level folder; or to keep each collection in a separate folder at the highest level. Wherever they are, speed and ease of access to them is about the same.