There is good reason for displaying physical collection objects – it enables the owner to see and enjoy them – and sometimes to show them off to family, friends, and others. I explicitly display newly acquired stamps in a small frame in front of my study desk before I put them into an album, in order to fully enjoy them before they are stored away. My book collections, too, are on display in my study on bookshelves, though, in this case, this is also where the books are stored – in my view, the ideal store/display combination. Some of my collections are simply not on physical display and have to be removed from their storage to be looked at, worked upon, and enjoyed, for example, Photos, Chocolate Wrappers, PAWDOC, and Mementos.
However, the physical objects themseleves needn’t necessarily be displayed to enjoy them. An equivalent degree of pleasure can be achieved by displaying the digital replicas. For example, for my Drawings and Paintings collection, photos of all 87 objects are displayed in my laptop’s screensaver: whenever I’m not using the laptop for a certain period the images are displayed in turn for a short period of time on the 27inch monitor on my study desk. I recently added the Mementos folder and the Photos folder to the set of images to be displayed, and random items from this combined set of three collections comprising some 21,000+ images, are now being displayed. I catch them sometimes as I pass the door or come into the study, and stand and watch, reflecting, as the images pass by. This is a very simple and effective way of bringing your collection objects to life. Of course, dedicated digital photo frames will do an equivalent job, though I have no experience of those products.
The other way I display the digital versions of objects in my collections is on my iPad as already described in an earlier post about ‘The Box’. Unlike the monitor permanently on my desk, the iPad is eminently portable and enables me to look at some of my collections elsewhere in the house, or when I’m away staying with family or friends or on holiday. In principle, the digital objects in each collection could be held separately on the iPad. However, I have chosen not to do this, but rather to present them as an overall combined set of collections, believing that this makes it easier to comprehend and to access the objects – not only for me but for others who might encounter the material. As the post about ‘The Box’ points out, there are a variety of issues associated with presenting multiple collections together including Content and Presentation (such as to be able to display groups of objects on specific subjects rather than an amorphous mass labelled, for example, ‘Mementos’); Physicality (those objects not having a digital version); and Technical capability (for example, constraints on what file formats can be displayed). Such issues indicate that combining collections in this way is not just a matter of putting collections together, but more of a re-envisioning exercise to understand and represent a new and different animal.
The application selected will play a major part in displaying collections on a tablet (or phone) as it will dictate what can be included and how it will look. There are probably many possible candidates available other than the one I’m currently using (SideBooks). For example, Perfect Viewer is described as a very fast image/comics/ebook viewer which supports a variety of formats including EPUB, HTML, TXT, PDF, JPG, PNG and TIFF. The 99Images website in which I read about Perfect Viewer also has a link to 43 alternative apps.
A final point to remember about displays is that whatever format they take, and whichever objects they include or exclude, the original collection with all its objects still exists in the background as the primary set of material.