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.

The final phase of this journey examines my own collections to establish if there are relationships or commonalities between them. The first step in this process was to identify all my collections – not a simple or quick task. However, I was aided by the CONTRAB list of collections and by the diagram of THE BOX – both described in earlier posts. I simply put all the collection names from these two sets of material down the left side of a spreadsheet, and each different room/area in my house and garden in a separate column along the top. Then I took the contents of each room in turn and marked which collection names they belonged to. For example, one of the bedrooms contained Books, Furniture, Linen and Soft Furnishings, Wall Hangings, Lamps, and Clothing & Accessories. Having done that I summarised what objects each collection name contained. For example, the collection name ‘Books’ had books of various different types in 12 rooms/areas. Then followed a rather laborious process of rationalising and renaming the collection names to satisfy my own thinking about what collections I possess. The outcome was a list of 92 collections in the high-level categories shown below. Note that collections belonging solely to my wife are excluded, but collections owned jointly are included: hence household goods and the like appear on the list.

• Decorative objects – 5 collections
• IT and Audio-Visual items – 5
• Toys and Games – 3
• Books – 10
• Pamphlets and Magazines – 5
• Documents – 6
• Family history – 4
• Correspondence- 3
• Pastime collections – 13
• Household Goods – 24
• Garden and Outdoor Goods – 8
• DIY Goods – 3
• Personal Apparel and Care – 3

This  exercise revealed the first insight I shall explore – that of Collection Consciousness:  becoming aware that some items constitute a collection, naming it, and becoming clearer about what it contains. The Decorative Objects category provides a good example. This includes the Ornaments collection which contains ornaments of all shapes and sizes residing in all parts of the house. I would not normally think about all these objects as a collection in their own right. However, the fact that they do logically fit together was clearly brought home to me when I was clearing a house and photographed a large selection of ornaments to see if family members wanted any of them. The Household Objects category provides many similar examples including the collections I named ‘Furniture’ and ‘Mirrors’. These categories not only illustrate how individuals can become conscious of a collection, but also provide an example of the thinking that goes on in that process: in the CONTRAB collections, larger, wall-hanging, mirrors could have been perceived as pieces of furniture; however, there were also smaller mirrors on stands to sit on a surface, and it seemed less logical to classify these as ‘Furniture’. Hence the establishment of the separate ‘Mirrors’ collection.

This small sequence of perception and thinking illustrates how people may become conscious of collections and decide what they include and what they should be called. It is all very subjective, highly dependent on the individual and current circumstances; and liable to change for the sake of expediency. Another example illustrates just how subjective this process can be: I’ve had a working toy steam engine set with a boiler and four appliances since I was a young boy.

It’s been sitting in the lofts of my various houses for over 40 years, and I’ve never considered it to be a collection. However, when I encountered it in the course of this exercise, I decided I wanted to see it as something in its own right, and rationalised that the four appliances were a collection of appliances. Consequently, the ‘Steam Engine Set’ is now a collection within the ‘Toys and Games’ category. I can see how this might be considered a dubious categorisation and that logically it should be part of the ‘Children’s Toys’ collection – but I want to see it as something in its own right so that it can be dealt with separately from ‘Children’s Toys’ which may just get randomly disposed of at some time in the future. This awareness of what I might want to happen to a collection downstream was also a factor in the 10 different collections in the Books category. Four of these collections – Mystery Books, Personal Books, Family Books, Work Books – all sit together on the bookcases in my study, and could have been classified as a single collection. However, I have clear ideas of what I want to happen to these different collections and so have placed them into separate collections. For example, having completed some work on my collection of Mysteries books, I anticipate selling it; and I hope that the Family book collection will be passed on down the generations of my family. A final example illustrates how sometimes the perception of a collection may simply be the result of trying to rationalise where to fit individual objects into the overall category structure that has been created in the mind. This concerns a category I have named ‘Laundry equipment’ and includes the objects washing machine, tumble dryer, Iron, wash basket, and plastic laundry basket. At first, I had the bedroom wash basket down as a piece of furniture, but that didn’t seem quite right. I also had the washing machine and tumble dryer as part of kitchen equipment. The resolution of this conundrum was to create the ‘Laundry Equipment’ collection. The implications of the observations for the relationship between collections is simply that the relationships, if any, are built in the owner’s mind. However, all these examples relate mainly to Accumulation-type collections, and have occurred during the very unusual process of defining all the collections within all of an individual’s possessions, and therefore may not be generalisable. Though, I suspect that they may well indicate the sort of thinking that goes on in the more commonplace dealings that individuals have with their Amateur Collections, Files, and Archives.

The iPad Transfer and CONTRAB discussions in earlier posts have inspired me to consider how collections could learn from each other or even be combined. This might be achieved by the following five step process:

• List collections
• Allocate Collection Type and Physical/Digital to each collection
• Allocate Practices to each collection
• Identify Collection/Practice combinations that you wish to explore for two or more collections
• Explore possibilities for Collection/Practice combinations

These steps are described in more detail, and with examples, below. 1. List Collections: Here is an example set of seven collections: Music, Silver, Memorabilia, Friend Emails, Family Archive, Computer Artefacts, Stamps. 2. Allocate Collection Type and Physical/Digital to each collection: Create a table with the collections in the left-hand column, and then populate a further two columns with Collection Type and whether the collection is primarily of Physical or Digital objects, as shown in the example below. Before specifying Collection Type, bear in mind the following: Accumulations are sets of objects that are collected out of functional necessity and made use of in some way or other. They are often undocumented and are rarely thought of as being complete or incomplete. Items tend to be acquired somewhat randomly without being part of any long-term plan. Amateur Collections are created when owners decide what they want to collect as a hobby, and then seek out and assemble appropriate pieces at their leisure. Items tend to be deliberately sought after, and owners often investigate aspects of the objects and become knowledgeable about them. Amateur collections may also be documented in some way or other. Files are collections of factual information assembled on a specific media, and retained to refer to and/or use later. Files often incorporate some form of labelling or indexing to help users find items within them. Paper-based documents are often collected in Files. Archives are collections of objects which have been moved from their original locations and placed into long-term storage. Archives often contain old things and may not be looked at very often. 3. Allocate Practices to each collection: Add another column to the table in which to specify any Practices that you intend to perform with each collection. Use single words where possible.4. Identify Collection/Practice combinations to be explored Go through the Practices and pick out any that occur in more than one collection and that you think might be similar or combined in any way. Number each instance as shown below. 5. Explore possibilities of sharing solutions for Collection/Practice combinations: Create a table with each of the numbered Practices in the left-most column and the collections in which they occur in a middle column. Then detail the way in which each Practice will be performed and/or supported across the collections in which it occurs, in the right-hand column as shown in the example below.I intend to try out this approach when I undertake the next phase of this journey – to investigate all my own collections with respect to features common to some or all of them.

To further explore the differences between CONTRAB’s four different Collection Types, I made a subjective assessment of the actions I was aware had been taken on each of the categories of object**. This identified 25 different Practices, each of which was performed on a varying number of the categories. For example, the Practice “Placed together to know where to find them and use them” was performed on 29 of the categories, and the Practice “Clean items with special fluid to ensure they continue to look good” was performed on only two of the categories.

** For this exercise it was necessary to break down two of the categories to lower levels as their components used different Practices: Bridge Artefacts (Bridge Booklets, Bridge Magazines, Bridge Books, Bridge Cards, Bridge Trophies, Bridge Scoring Pads); and Garden Goods (Garden Furniture, Gardening Equipment, Gardening Chemicals, Soils and Composts, Plants in Pots). Including these breakdowns, 65 categories were employed in this investigation of Practices.

All 25 Practices and the number of categories they were performed on, are listed below.

The above table indicates that Accumulations and Amateur Collections can utilise many of the Practices. Indeed, the same may also be true of Files and Archives but the small number of Files (4) and Archives (1) in this sample preclude any conclusions being drawn. What the table does demonstrate, however, is that a wide range of Practices are performed on collections, and that some Practices are more common than others. The table is by no means an exhaustive list of Practices: a wider study of many more collections and owners would undoubtedly identify more practices, and would provide a clearer indication of their usage by different types of collection.

One item of note in the table above is that there were 7 categories for which no practices were identified. All 7 were Accumulations – Furniture, Lamps, Clocks, Mirrors, Garden Furniture, Plants in Pots, and Unused Goods. However, the fact that no Practices were identified for these items is not particularly significant; it just indicates how ‘quick and dirty’ this exercise has been. No doubt a more detailed study would have identified practices associated with each of them. However, there is one characteristic common to each of these categories that may provide an explanation as to why no Practices were immediately identified for them: most consist of items that may be placed in a distributed manner throughout house and garden. Even the Unused Goods (for example, unwanted gifts such as boxes of soaps etc.) were found in a variety of rooms in the house. Such categories of items are perhaps not perceived as collections until gathered together.

Four different types of collections were identified in the CONTRAB collection: Accumulations, Amateur Collections, Files, and an Archive. Accumulations are sets of objects that are collected out of functional necessity and made use of in some way or other, and the vast majority (46) of the 56 CONTRAB categories are of this type. These are things like Household Goods and Clothes – things that are just collected in the normal course of life, and that are relatively commonplace. The other ten instances of CONTRAB collections are listed in the table below.

Amateur collectors decide what they want to collect as a hobby, and then seek out and assemble appropriate pieces at their leisure. In this case, the Silver collection (of salvers, dishes, jugs, spoons and the like) was characterised by a diligent documentation of the markings on the pieces to identify dates and makers; the collection of Dried Flowers (in two boxes nearly 1 metre in length) was assembled to support a hobby of flower arranging; the blue Wedgewood pottery was displayed as a group in the house; for the Sea Shell collection a wooden cabinet with 16 drawers was custom built; and the Matchboxes were stored, unused, in a labelled box.

The four CONTRAB File categories are easily recognisable as such: three are of Documents and one of Brochures and Pamphlets (though a more general definition of a File could be ‘a collection of factual information assembled on a specific media, retained to refer to and/or use later’). Finally, one Archive appears in the list – a collection of objects which have been moved from their original locations and placed into long-term storage. This is a collection of old family papers – birth, marriage and death certificates, identification papers, and the like – going back over several generations and stored in a special small leather case.

These examples illustrate why Accumulations seem less remarkable than the other types of collections: Amateur Collections, Files and Archives are simply less common – and more unusual – than mere Accumulations of clothes, furniture etc.. Having said that, the increase in paper documents in the last forty years, and the emergence of the mass storage of digital documents stored on personal computers, in the same period, has perhaps made the File category just as unremarkable.

The documentation of CONTRAB was a large complicated exercise, and the allocation of Collection Types to each category was made in the heat of the moment. However, on reflection and in retrospect, the following qualifications are worthy of note.

It will be evident from the above that specifying Collection Types – and even deciding whether a group of items are a Collection at all – is NOT an exact science. However, neither is it of any great importance other than a) assisting in organising a set of collections, and b) contributing to our analysis and understanding of the Collecting activity. I subscribe to the view that a collection is anything that an owner considers to be a collection (which, I might add, may involve just one item); and that, if collection types are to be employed, then the important thing is to allocate them as consistently as possible.

As described at the beginning of this journey, the second investigation I’m carrying out is into my mother’s collections. She sold her house earlier this year before going into a Care Home, and my involvement in clearing the house contents has given me a unique insight into all her possessions. Of particular use has been the photos I took of various collections of objects (glassware, for example) in order to ask if any members of the family would like to have any items. For the sake of clarity and brevity, I am naming this overall set of items the CONTRAB collection (selected because my mother used to play Contract Bridge) and shall only refer to it in that way going forward.

This post will outline the overall contents of CONTRAB, in terms of the categories of items it contains, and the number of items in each category. Subsequent posts will discuss the types of collections that the categories fall into; and what practices were associated with the CONTRAB categories.  A final post will record what implications for combining collections have emerged from this examination of CONTRAB.

CONTRAB is the collection of objects belonging to an elderly widower who has downsized her house. It consists of 8972 items in 56 different categories. However, before exploring the make-up of these  items, the following key points need to be remembered:

• These are point-in-time numbers. A substantial number of items will have been discarded in the downsizing move. Figures from even earlier than that, and Lifetime Total figures, will be substantially higher.
• The categories into which these items have been placed, have not been defined by the owner, but instead by a relative. The owner may well have specified different categories and used different criteria to place items into those categories.
• 3448 of the 8972 items are photographs. This indicates how misleading the absolute numbers can be. Consequently, greater emphasis has been placed on percentages. In some cases, the photo numbers have been excluded entirely from the calculations.
• Sometimes groups of items have been counted as a single item, thereby underestimating item numbers. For example, the needles and pins in the overall collection of sewing equipment have not been counted individually. Indeed, there are several items in the sewing collection that could have been counted in a number of different ways. Another example of how choices have had to be made is that it was decided to count a pair of shoes as 1 item not 2. Despite these qualifications, the numbers in different categories do give an indication of scale.
• In some cases, too much work would have been involved to undertake a detailed accurate count, so a guess was made. This is what was done with the sewing equipment.

The 56 Categories into which the items have been placed are shown in the figure below, together with percentage totals both including and excluding photos.

The largest category, excluding photos, is Household Goods. This wide-ranging category is further broken down in the table below.

The figures in these tables speak for themselves: if you exclude the large number of photos, well over 50% of the items consist of either Household Goods and Documents. However, that is perhaps unsurprising. Of greater interest is the types of collections that these categories fall into: 46 are Accumulations, and, of the other ten, five are Amateur Collections, four are Files, and one is an Archive. The following post describes these different types of collection in more detail.

Having acquired a new iPad, I needed to transfer all my digital object collections from old to new tablet, so I decided to take the opportunity to explore the issues associated with a combined set of collections. I’m using the iPad Sidebooks app which provides a hierarchical bookshelf interface. A set of objects sits on a bookshelf. Each object can be either a single file or can represent a lower-level bookshelf containing either single files and/or objects representing even lower-level bookshelves. The Sidebooks app does display objects in an attractive visual way, and the iPad is a very portable and easy to open up and use in any setting. However, that doesn’t mean to say that it is necessarily the best place to combine collections. The following shortcomings need to be understood from the outset:

• Sidebooks can display digital objects, but many of the collections have objects which are only in physical form, for example, the stamp collection.
• Sidebooks is not the primary storage location for any of these collections (for digital items it is the laptop; and the physical items are located in a variety of places), so there is a danger of the Sidebooks version getting out of synch with the original.
• Some collections loaded into Sidebooks may be broken down into a limited number of named subsets for ease of comprehensibility and access, but the files in the original collection are not sub-divided in that way.
• For some collections (such as Mementos) only a subset of the objects is downloaded into Sidebooks; those items not in named subsets are simply not present.

Having said all that, the exercise to transfer a range of collection objects into the new iPad did provide an opportunity to think about the practicalities of Combining Collections. Actually, the word ‘transfer’ is not strictly correct; in fact, I just used the material on my old iPad as input to what needed to be loaded into the new iPad. Other inputs included the journeys I’ve recorded in this web site; and my awareness of other collections that I have. This examination surfaced the first issue associated with combining collections – Content. In some cases, it was difficult to decide whether to include a collection or not because of the personal nature of the material (poetry written in my younger years for example), and because the new iPad might be looked at by family members or by those inheriting when I die. I also experienced issues with the Mementos collection because it has hundreds of files distinguished only by facets in the index. To just include every memento file in Sidebooks would present the user with an amorphous mass. Instead, I wanted to have named subsets of material like the companies I worked for or the places I lived. However, this meant choosing a limited number of named subsets – and leaving out the remaining files.

Having decided what collections to include, I was now ready to start loading objects into the new iPad; but was immediately faced with Presentation issues: I know from my experience with my old iPad, that the top level in Sidebooks can look extremely cluttered making it difficult to grasp the totality of what is being represented – even if you are the owner and are familiar with the material. For other people – family or those inheriting collections – it must be an even bigger problem – see below.

Of course, it might just be the app. There are many other similar applications out there and they might do a better job. I shall certainly be looking into that in the later stages of this journey; and, of course, it may simply be better to combine the collections in the place they are currently stored – the laptop. However, for this exercise of moving to a new iPad, I’m sticking with Sidebooks; so, I needed to find a way to present the combined set of collections in a clearer way.

The solution I came up with was a PDF document with all the collections shown on the front page and with links to descriptions of each collection in the body of the document. This sits at the top level In Sidebooks with the front page showing. At the same level in Sidebooks are icons representing the bookshelves which contain substantive objects at lower levels in the hierarchy.

The PDF document also enables information to be included about the collections which are not suitable for including in Sidebooks such as the Stamp collection (I was able to include a list of the countries being collected and their status). I believe the PDF diagram makes things clearer – but it’ll be interesting to see if I have the same view several months down-stream.

There was another reason for creating a front-end diagram of all the collections: to cater for the needs of other people (such as family, or those who inherit) who might encounter the material. It seems to me that there are three main characteristics which need to be catered for: first, people easily become overwhelmed and turned-off by large quantities of unfamiliar and apparently disorganised things; second, many people are just simply not interested in some of things that we ourselves are interested in; and finally, people will always want what they have not got; but once they have those things, while wanting to still have them, they lose a lot of interest in them.  All three characteristics may affect how people feel about a combined set of collections. Therefore, I have chosen to call the PDF document ‘THE BOX’, and to list all the different collections in the box on the front page of the PDF, in an attempt to inspire interest, and to avoid overwhelming people (though I’m not sure this latter requirement has been achieved…)  – see below.

The descriptive information within the PDF enables people who aren’t really interested in the named topic to get a quick idea of what’s in the collection without being overwhelmed by the objects themselves, thereby perhaps wetting their appetites to find out more; and once people become familiar with the contents of THE BOX, it may provide them with the confidence of knowing where the things they treasure are located. The idea is that THE BOX is full of unknown and interesting things and provides a quick way of finding out a bit more, and of documenting clearly what is where. Whether THE BOX succeeds in doing this is again something I may have more views on in a few months’ time.

With the rough design of THE BOX established, I started to load in the various digital objects associated with each collection. This is when I started to find other Content issues. In some cases, I had to make decisions about whether to include or exclude particular objects; for example, in my collection of Scribbles (Doodles, Reflective Writings, Poems etc) I decided to exclude school essays, but included designs for cards I made for particular people/occassions. In other instances, I revised how things were named and organised; for example, what was in the old iPad as a single set of  ‘Paintings and Posters’ became a set named ‘Art’ subdivided into ‘Paintings & Drawings’, ‘Collages’, ‘Prints’, ‘Posters’, and ‘Sculptures’.

Another content-related issue was where an object can appear logically in two or more collections; for example, “The Meteor” – a book I self-published about parts of my stamp collection – can logically appear within both the ‘Stamp’ collection and the ‘Books I have written’ collection. This is an issue I had previously encountered in the Electronic Story Board journey, and is an inevitability with large collections of material. For small numbers of digital objects there is a simple solution: simply place a copy of the object concerned in both places. For larger numbers of digital objects, it may be best to provide links to the master version of the object concerned. The former is the only feasible solution in Sidebooks.

As I continued to load more collections into Sidebooks, I encountered a number of instances in which the Technical constraints of the Sidebooks app affected what could be included in the overall combined collection. Sidebooks only supports PDF files, so if large numbers of objects in a collection are stored in another format – Word or jpg for example, a large amount of effort would be required to convert them all into PDF to display them in Sidebooks. In the case of very wide spreadsheets even converting them to PDF wouldn’t work well because the conversion process would create page breaks across the width of the spreadsheet resulting in a PDF consisting of a series of rather disjointed pages. Hence, such technical issues create practical issues affecting what can be combined in a single overall space. Obviously, the more consistency that exists between the way the objects in a particular collection are constructed, and the technical requirements of the application which is to display all the collections, the easier it is going to be to create the combined collection. A prime example of this is when individual objects are given informative file titles, but it is subsequently decided to combine multiple individual files into a single PDF file to meet Sidebook’s requirements, for example. In this circumstance it is likely that much of the file title information will be lost.

The final issue I encountered was specifically to do with Physicality: some collections were simply not in a state to include in an overall digital combined collection. For example, the stamp collection consists of 19 physical albums. To digitise them would not only be too onerous, but the result would be out of date as new items get added.  For these types of collections, THE BOX provides a perfect compromise in which some information can be provided without having to load in the actual objects themselves.

In summary, the main issues I encountered when trying to re-assemble a combined collection on the iPad, are to do with Content, Presentation, Technology, and Physicality. These are the topics that I shall pay considerable attention to when undertaking the next phase of this journey. And, for the record, the statistics associated with this initial attempt at an overall combined collection are: 19 separate collections of which 11 have objects in Sidebooks consisting of 2478 separate files taking up 22.6 Gb of storage.

Over the years I’ve organised a wide variety of collections – many of them documented in this web site. Each one has had its own special challenges and solutions. However, I’ve also noticed the following types of commonalities between the collections and the way I’ve dealt with them:

• Relationships between objects: for example, between a Supertramp album digitised for the Music collection, and a ticket to a 1972 Supertramp concert in the Memento collection
• Indexes: for example, the index for my own personal Memento collection from before I was married, has exactly the same fields as the index to the separate collection of Mementos belonging to my wife and myself.
• Searching: as a result of the worldwide take up of internet search engines such as Google, search these days is invariably done by specifying keywords and phrases, regardless of the way the information being searched is structured. For example, The Photo collection has an index of each set off photos (mapping onto the old-style films that were inserted in cameras and developed) which can be searched for things like particular holiday destinations or photos from a particular year; however, the Trophy collection has no index and instead just has files with extensive descriptive information within the file titles which can be searched using the windows File Explorer Search bar.
• Display and access – physical objects: for example, the Book collection is on display in bookcases, and the memento collection is on display in boxes and folders on a shelf in a tallboy.
• Display and access – digital collections: for example, both the University Books collection and some of the Letter collection are in the Sidebooks app on the iPad.
• Storage – physical objects: for example, those objects in the Computer Artefact collection that are not in the display cabinet are stored in containers in the loft; and the family memento collection is stored in folders in a chest in a downstairs room.
• Storage – digital objects: for example, the Photo Collection’s digital files and the PAWDOC digital document collection are both stored in Window’s folders.
• Passing on collections: for example, in the case of both the Physical Memento collection and the Stamp collection I was uncertain if younger members of the family would want to inherit them and consequently took steps to mitigate the problem (for the Memento collection I created a Wish Table which identified those items which were important for family history and those which could be disposed of without concern; and for the stamp collection I digitised the stamp pages and created two copies of a hardcopy book – one for each grandchild).

Such commonalities have led me to believe there may be some merit in a detailed examination of each collection with a view to identifying if there are:

• Better ways of doing things for an individual collection
• Standardised ways of doing things across collections
• Collections that might be usefully combined together in some way
• Particular technologies that might be applied across collections.

As I’ve been thinking about how to undertake this journey, I’ve acquired an iPad Pro to replace the old iPad Air in which many of my digital objects reside in the Sidebooks app; so, I already have a data migration job to perform. Therefore, I’ve decided I’ll use the opportunity to examine ALL of my collections to re-assess what should appear in Sidebooks and how they should be ordered and arranged. This exercise will provide me with an opportunity to document all my collections and to take a partial look at the commonality questions.

With those learnings under my belt, I intend to take this journey forward with a detailed overall look at two separate sets of collections. First, collections belonging to my mother who is now residing in a home and who has entrusted most of her personal belongings to me; and secondly, all my own collections. I’m hoping that these two disparate sets of material will be sufficiently diverse to produce some generalisable conclusions.