Category Archives: JOURNEYS IN PROGRESS

Identifying Collection Commonalities

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The iPad Transfer and COTRAB 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.

CONTRAB Practices

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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.

CONTRAB Collection Types

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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.

Categories Number % of Total % of total excluding photos Type of Collection
Silver 269 3.0% 4.9% Amateur collection
Dried Flowers 43 0.5% 0.8% Amateur collection
Wedgewood 33 0.4% 0.6% Amateur collection
Sea Shells 331 3.7% 6.0% Amateur collection
Matchboxes 20 0.2% 0.4% Amateur collection
Documents 1059 11.8% 19.2% File
Bridge Club Documents 16 0.2% 0.3% File
Bridge Competition Documents 115 1.3% 2.1% File
Pamphlets & Brochures 29 0.3% 0.5% File
Family Archive 32 0.4% 0.6% Archive

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.

Category Collection Type Notes on the allocation of Collection Type
Photos and Memorabilia Accumulation It could have been argued that neither photos nor Memorabilia were really functional necessities and therefore not Accumulations. However, the Photos were taken to be looked at, and the Memorabilia items were kept as a reminder of something when they were looked at, and these were their functions. Furthermore, they were generally accumulated somewhat randomly, rather than deliberately acquired to add to a collection.
Cutlery Accumulation A cutlery cabinet was specifically made for part of the cutlery collection and that might suggest this subset could have been an Amateur Collection. However, the cutlery in the cabinet was used regularly for its functional purpose and so was considered to be an Accumulation.
Glassware Accumulation Part of the glassware collection was a set of crystal glasses that was documented on a list, and this could have been considered to be an Amateur Collection. However, the crystal was used regularly for its functional purpose and so it was considered to be an Accumulation.
Dried Flowers Amateur Collection The fact that this was integral to supporting the hobby of Flower Arranging (for which a tuition course was taken) is what determined this to be an Amateur Collection.
Silver Amateur Collection It is mainly the documentation of the items, supported by books to aid identification, that made this an Amateur Collection.
Wedgewood Amateur Collection The relatively large number of items (33), and the way they were displayed together, is what determined this to be an Amateur Collection.
Sea Shells Amateur Collection This was a classic Amateur Collection – a hobby collecting a non-functional item, for which a special cabinet was made, and identification books bought and used.
Jewellery Accumulation This could easily have been classed as an Amateur Collection since great attention was paid to what was in the collection, and to acquiring new items for the collection. However, the primary reason for having the items was for their function – to be able to wear them.
Music Accumulation This could have been classed as an Amateur Collection since the material was kept together, listened to regularly and the collection gradually built-up over time. It could also have been argued that it was not a Functional Necessity.  However, no attempt was made to document the collection nor to specifically build it up, and its primary focus was functional – to listen to the music – and hence it was determined to be an Accumulation.
Matchboxes Amateur Collection This was another classic Amateur Collection – a hobby collecting a non-functional item, and the items were kept separately in their own labelled box.
Addresses Accumulation This could have been classified as a File, as it essentially consisted of information, albeit stored in a variety of media (Address Books, Telephone Number flip Booklet, Presentation Folder, and Database). However, addresses were a functional necessity and acquired as and when they arrived; and these characteristics, as well as the variety of media, determined this to be an Accumulation.
Diaries Accumulation This could have been classified as a File, as it was information written on pages. However, this was a box of pocket diaries, one for each of many years (45), without any specific index information, which was gradually built-up year after year, and this is what determined it to be an Accumulation.
Pamphlets & Brochures File It could have been argued that this was not a File because it was more akin to a collection of books (which are not classed as a File unless special controls are applied). However, these items were generally very thin with a relatively small number of pages, and there were quite a few of them (29), so they were very similar to documents; and this is what determined the collection to be a File.
Recipes Accumulation This could have been considered to be a File as there were a lot of individual cuttings and handwritten notes in this collection. However, many were shoved into booklets, and at least one whole book (which also contained blank pages for writing on) was included. That, and the fact that it was not ordered in any way (in fact it was extremely disordered) is what determined it to be an Accumulation.
School Accumulation These could have been classed as a File as they were mainly exercise books and work books. However, there were only a small number of them (5) and they weren’t arranged in any particular way, and hence they were classed as an Accumulation.
Family Archive Archive This was a classic example of an Archive – very old stuff associated with earlier generations, kept in a special case.
Owner’s Home Town Accumulation This was borderline to qualify as any kind of collection, as it was just 4 Christmas cards showing different old-time scenes of the owner’s home town. In retrospect they would have been better placed with the other Memorabilia items rather than giving them their own category – though that would still have classed them as an Accumulation.
Religious Artefacts Accumulation This was borderline as a collection as there were only three items. However, they were specific artefacts of the same type, and this is why they were considered to be a collection.

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.

The CONTRAB Collection

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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.

Ref Main Categories Number % of Total % of Total Excluding Photos Type of Collection
1 Photos 3448 38.4%   Accumulation
2-25 Household goods (the breakdown of this category is in another  table below) 2121 23.6% 38.4% See table below
26 Documents 1059 11.8% 19.2% File
27 Clothing & Accessories 340 3.8% 6.2% Accumulation
28 Sea Shells 331 3.7% 6.0% Amateur collection
29 Memorabilia 307 3.4% 5.6% Accumulation
30 Bridge Artefacts 148 1.6% 2.7% Accumulation
31 Bridge Club Documents 16 0.2% 0.3% File
32 Bridge Competition Documents 115 1.3% 2.1% File
33 Jewellery 201 2.2% 3.6% Accumulation
34 Letters & Cards 156 1.7% 2.8% Accumulation
35 Music 125 1.4% 2.3% Accumulation
36 Books 114 1.3% 2.1% Accumulation
37 Stationery 80 0.9% 1.4% Accumulation
38 Garden Goods 62 0.7% 1.1% Accumulation
39 Addresses 51 0.6% 0.9% Accumulation
40 Personal Care 55 0.6% 1.0% Accumulation
41 Diaries 45 0.5% 0.8% Accumulation
42 Unused Goods 36 0.4% 0.7% Accumulation
43 Family Archive 32 0.4% 0.6% Archive
44 Pamphlets & Brochures 29 0.3% 0.5% File
45 Matchboxes 20 0.2% 0.4% Amateur collection
46 Recipes 17 0.2% 0.3% Accumulation
47 Husband’s Artefacts 13 0.1% 0.2% Accumulation
48 Employer Artefacts 9 0.1% 0.2% Accumulation
49 Certificates 7 0.1% 0.1% Accumulation
50 Crocheting & Tatting 7 0.1% 0.1% Accumulation
51 Coins 7 0.1% 0.1% Accumulation
52 Handheld Fans 5 0.1% 0.1% Accumulation
53 School 5 0.1% 0.1% Accumulation
54 IT & Phone Equipment 4 0.0% 0.1% Accumulation
55 Town of birth 4 0.0% 0.1% Accumulation
56 Religious Artefacts 3 0.0% 0.1% Accumulation
Total 8972  

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

Ref Household Goods (HG) Number % of HG % of All % of All Excluding Photos Type of Collection
2 Linen and Soft Furnishings 383 18.1% 4.3% 6.9% Accumulation
3 Silver 269 12.7% 3.0% 4.9% Amateur collection
4 Cutlery 254 12.0% 2.8% 4.6% Accumulation
5 Glassware 209 9.9% 2.3% 3.8% Accumulation
6 Crockery 202 9.5% 2.3% 3.7% Accumulation
7 Tools 125 5.9% 1.4% 2.3% Accumulation
8 Kitchen Equipment 93 4.4% 1.0% 1.7% Accumulation
9 Ornaments 82 3.9% 0.9% 1.5% Accumulation
10 Foodstuffs 70 3.3% 0.8% 1.3% Accumulation
11 Trays & Table Mats 69 3.3% 0.8% 1.2% Accumulation
12 Furniture 67 3.2% 0.7% 1.2% Accumulation
13 Flower Vases & Bowls & Indoor Pots 63 3.0% 0.7% 1.1% Accumulation
14 Dried Flowers 43 2.0% 0.5% 0.8% Amateur collection
15 Wedgewood 33 1.6% 0.4% 0.6% Amateur collection
16 Cleaning Equipment 31 1.5% 0.3% 0.6% Accumulation
17 Frames 26 1.2% 0.3% 0.5% Accumulation
18 Objets d’Arts 21 1.0% 0.2% 0.4% Accumulation
19 Wall Hangings 18 0.8% 0.2% 0.3% Accumulation
20 Cases 16 0.8% 0.2% 0.3% Accumulation
21 Keys 12 0.6% 0.1% 0.2% Accumulation
22 Lamps 11 0.5% 0.1% 0.2% Accumulation
23 Audio-Visual Equipment 10 0.5% 0.1% 0.2% Accumulation
24 Clocks 9 0.4% 0.1% 0.2% Accumulation
25 Mirrors 5 0.2% 0.1% 0.1% Accumulation
Total 2121  

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.

Feedback and/on AI

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It was probably early in 2023 that I decided enough was enough. I’d been getting plagued with requests for feedback every time I made an online purchase or had an interaction with an organisation; so, I decided I wouldn’t do feedback anymore. It’s been liberating. However, that’s not so say I haven’t wanted to speak my mind occassionally – especially when I’ve had a bad experience, and I’ve had a few of those recently; but in those circumstances I lodge a complaint. Unfortunately, complaints can be hard work, and even the way the complaint is handled is sometimes itself worthy of a complaint. Perhaps its about time that organisations stopped plaguing us with feedback requests, and started to really examine their interactions with customers. At the moment every organisation seems to be ploughing money into using AI to create so-called intelligent Chat Bots (which I have found to be useless so far). A more productive approach might be to use AI to examine every interaction they have with customers – verbal and written combined with process statistics about delivery times etc.. The AI would be able to deduce from tone, language and performance whether or not a customer was satisfied or not. The more proactive managements might even be able to use this intelligence to step in and deal with problems as they are happening, rather than just trying to improve processes and training retrospectively.

A Lack of Laces

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I’ve had trainers that I really liked, but the laces frayed before the trainers wore out. I went back to the retailer to get replacement laces, but they didn’t have any that were an exact match. You see, trainers today come as a complete package: both functional and designer – and with a pair of laces that do one and big-up the other. Getting replacement laces is very, very difficult. I’ve never managed it. Yet this could be a money maker for the suppliers and an insurance for the purchaser. If I’d been offered spare pairs of laces for the trainers I was buying, I would have bought at least one pair – maybe two. It could be a nice little earner for the  retailer; the buyer would be a happier bunny; and, maybe, there’d be fewer trainers in landfill.

An iPad Combination

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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.

A Search for Collection Commonalities

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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.

Turning a Stamp Album into a Book

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It was in the lounge of our house in Singapore in the 1950s that my father took me through some of the pages of his album. I was about 7 or 8, and it’s my earliest recollection of stamps. Some big ones made particular impressions –  two portraying Spanish Galleons, one of a long grey one of a man, and a red one with a star.

 

A few years later I started collecting stamps myself. I wasn’t an avid collector, but the various accoutrements of my collection – albums (stick-in and stock books), tweezers, country envelopes, tatty envelopes full of stamps on paper waiting to be soaked off – had always been with me from those early days. It was something I did from time to time – a tactile and gentle pursuit – as had hundreds of thousands of like-minded collectors for well over a hundred years.

Sometime in the 1990s, when my father was getting on a bit, he gave me his stamp albums – including that one he had showed me in the lounge in Singapore all those years ago. I didn’t do much with that Meteor album for several years; but, as retirement approached in 2012, a germ of an idea started to formulate. The album wasn’t full by any means but it did contain a substantial number of stamps across about 30 countries. My father had always produced beautiful handwriting, and he had written the name of the relevant country in black ink and capital letters at the top of each page as in the example below.

I decided I would discard pages without a country name and would try and completely fill all the pages that remained in the album, unconstrained by date order, or whole or part sets, or whether they were mint or used; but guided by the eras of the existing stamps. I made one exception to this goal: Italy was particularly well endowed with stamps, so I decided to use the spare untitled pages to collect all Italian stamps produced up to 1980 as defined in the 1997 Stanley Gibbons Simplified Catalogue. I perhaps didn’t quite realise at the time how ambitious this might be, though, in my defence, I may have casually thought that it wouldn’t matter if some of the more expensive items were simply missed out (a seriously unrealistic misjudgement….). Anyway, once full, the album would then become a kind of memorial of my father and his stamp collecting and his immaculate writing. I could round it off with a page at the beginning describing how he collected stamps and inspired me to do so, and including some photos of him at various stages of his life.

I duly gathered together the pages with country headings, moved stamps on untitled pages, and set about finding stamps to fill the gaps. Having this goal inspired me to attend stamp fairs, and to start buying auction lots; and by about 2017 I’d completed 14 of the 33 countries; but I was starting to realise that it was going to be a big – and expensive – job to acquire the whole of Italy up to 1980.

It was also in 2017 that my second grandchild was born and I was beginning to wonder whether I, like my father, would be able to pass on my stamp collection to one or both of them. I knew that none of my own children were in the slightest bit interested in stamps; so, the grandchildren were probably the last port of call. However, there could be no guarantee that they would be interested either; and, in any case, what would happen if they both became collectors? How could I choose which one to give their great-grandfather’s album to? I ruminated on this conundrum as I continued to add to the album.

Sometime during the following few years, I decided to augment the burgeoning album with the catalogue entries for the stamps it contained (something I’d already done successfully in my Great Britain album by simply cutting out the relevant parts of pages from the ‘Collect British Stamps’ catalogue). I reasoned that the information associated with the issuance of stamps – whether to commemorate a person or event, or to indicate what reign of a monarch it took place in – was not only useful to manage the collection, but also interesting, perhaps even educational, even for those not generally interested in stamp collecting; and that the relative values of different stamps attest to the scarcity and desirability of the more valuable items. All this information would surely make the album that much more interesting to its potential future owners. To enable the reader to match a stamp to its catalogue entry would simply require that the relevant catalogue number was written next to each stamp.

I started with the Italian collection and placed cut-outs or photocopies of the relevant catalogue entries onto the relevant pages.

When it came to the other countries, though, I realised this wouldn’t work because, not being constrained to stamps from consecutive dates or sets, meant that there was just too extensive a range of catalogue entries to include. So, for those pages, I elected to scan the relevant catalogue pages and to cut and paste the entries relevant to a particular album page onto a single page using the PowerPoint software package (the blue highlights in the example below indicate which stamps are included in the album).

My plan was to print these pages out and to attach them to the inside back cover of the album so that the relevant page could be turned out to the right of the album and be visible when a particular album page was being looked at. I was confident that I could achieve this at the bookbinding classes I’d been attending for 5 years or so. I duly acquired two old 1999 and 2000 Simplified Catalogues for the non-Italian countries for about a fiver each on ebay (shown below) and set about assembling the catalogue entries for each country and labelling each stamp in the album.

In 2020, I had won an auction lot of a single album dedicated to Italian stamps including many of the more valuable earlier items. This made substantial inroads into my Italian Wants list.  It had cost me £380 – about double the amount I usually invested in an auction lot; but, after removing the stamps I needed, I was able to break up the contents and sell them for around £200 overall – an excellent defrayment of the original cost.

2020 was also the year I decided I would self-publish a book about my IT experiences over the previous 50 years, using an internet-based company called Blurb. The resulting 8×10 inch hardback with 440 glossy pages, lots of colour photos and images, and a glossy, full colour, wrap-around dust jacket initiated another germ of an idea. I realised that I could scan the pages of the filled Meteor album and include them in a Blurb-produced book. I could have two copies of the book produced, so that I could give one to each grandchild at some point. It wouldn’t matter if they marked or tore them, or damaged them in any way, as the digital version would always be available to produce new copies if necessary. There would be no concerns about damaging or losing valuable stamps, or of the album being sold off by young adults eager to release funds (a possibility perceived by my own youthful short-sightedness); and I could have a copy myself, secure in the knowledge that, if my collection was stolen at any time, or destroyed in a fire or random act of god, I would still have the book to look at and enjoy.

With these ideas firmed up and cemented in my mind, I set out with renewed vigour to complete the non-Italian countries, and to start acquiring the more expensive Italian stamps (by that point I’d decided it had to be ALL the Italian stamps to 1980). Ebay was my main source for this material, though I did get some stamps from eBid and Hipstamp. Using all these sites, I soon completed all but two of the non-Italian countries, and started to home in on the remaining Italian wants. It soon became apparent to me that the more expensive stamps could be purchased for a wide range of prices. This was partly due to varying quality but was also related to how quickly individuals or dealers wanted to realise their cash. I started to scour eBay regularly looking for bargain ‘Buy-it-Nows’ or low starting prices. I eventually came across Kilowareman – an unusual operation based in the Netherlands which appeared to have an unlimited supply of ex-dealer’s stock and which published dozens of new lots on ebay every day with a standard starting price of 1 Euro regardless of value, including many of the Italian stamps I wanted. I bought several of the high value stamps I needed from Kilowareman, and was never disappointed; despite a standard £1.50 postage cost to anywhere in Europe, they always arrived safely about a week after the auction in a cellophane packet attached to a page inscribed ‘greetings from Kilowareman’ inside a simple envelope. On one extraordinary occasion I won a lot of 7 overprinted stamps with a catalogue value of several thousand pounds (at 2020 values) with a bid of £54 which I submitted in the last few seconds of the auction while having a post-competition lunch at a golf club.

Common sense would say that they must be fakes – but they didn’t look any different from the real thing and I wasn’t going to start detailed investigations to determine if they were genuine or not. They would look fine in my father’s album; and, in any case, I reasoned that, if KIlowareman was selling bulk lots of ex-dealer’s stocks, then the original dealers would have had to be taken in as well or simply not have marked the items as of doubtful provenance – which was possible but perhaps a little unlikely. Well, that was my rationale for happily paying far less than catalogue value for the more expensive stamps.

By early 2022, I was very close to completing the whole collection with just 3 Italian stamps to get. One of the Italian stamps was specified as a 10 cent stamp in the Stanley Gibbons Simplified album, however, all my trawlings and investigations led me to believe it was a 40 cent stamp (which I did have). So, I emailed the Stanley Gibbons Catalogue Department and asked if this was the case. On 19th January I received the answer – it was indeed a long-standing misprint – reminding me that you can never be absolutely sure that anything in print or on the internet is correct: reader beware!

On the same day I bought one of the other two outstanding items in HipStamp, leaving me with a last remaining gap for PL650, a 30 cent blue Italian Parcel Post stamp from 1945. Not the most expensive Italian stamp according to Stanley Gibbons (£39 mint, £31 used), but the most elusive in my experience.  I finally found it a week later by searching an Italian Dealer’s items on eBay using the Italian word for parcel – ‘pacchi’. I’d missed this previously because, for some unknown reason, searches using the English equivalent, ‘parcel’, didn’t produce any hits – despite the word parcel being displayed in the title of the lot – ‘1945 Lieutenancy Parcel Post 30 Cent MNH’. However, all became clear when I got confirmation of my order from ebay: The actual title was, ‘1945 LUOGOTENENZA PACCHI POSTALI 60 CENT MNH’, and the title I’d been shown must have been an automatic translation which was not used in the search algorithm. It was a timely reminder that internet searching is not an exact science, and that some thought and perseverance may be required to find what you want.

By this time, I had started to explore how I would construct the book using Blurb’s BookWright software. I decided that there were too many stamps to include in a single album, so I bought another album just like the one my father had given me, on eBay. I then had one album for the Italian stamps and one for all the other countries.

Next, I turned to the practicalities of assembling the album pages in Blurb’s publishing programme – particularly the following:

  • Ensuring the stamps would be reproduced in actual size: The scan of a whole album page was too big for the book page, so when importing the scan to a Blurb page the system automatically resized it to fit thereby producing smaller than actual sizes of the stamps. To avoid this, I needed to crop the image before importing it; so, I created an overlay which lay on the scanner platen and on which the album page was layed. The outline of the overlay in the resulting scan was where the image would be cropped. Using this approach, and after some trial and error, I got the sizes of the stamps in the imported images in the book to be pretty much actual size.
  • Getting the composite catalogue pages in shape: The four-column format I’d used to construct the composite catalogue pages for each country was based on them fitting into the back of the meteor album. However, as I’d already discovered with the album pages, the Blurb book pages were smaller, and I realised I would have to rejig the country catalogue pages to a three-column format. This wasn’t too difficult using Powerpoint, and I exported the resulting images in png format ready for inclusion in the book. There was one issue – Blurb alerts warned me that the resolution of these images were ‘lower than that which Blurb recommends for great print quality’. This despite me scanning the catalogue pages at a very high resolution. I think resolution deteriorated through the various stages of cutting and pasting elements of the overall page.  Anyway, they were readable when I printed them out from PowerPoint, so I hoped they’d still be readable in the Blurb book, and indeed it turned out that they were.
  • Positions, sizes and colours of page numbers and running headers: I decided to provide a standard header on each page consisting of country name and date range of the stamps on the page, for example, ‘Ceylon, 1886 – 1926’. These would be placed in bold red 10 pt Times New Roman font at the top of each page, on the left side of the left-hand pages and on the right side of the right-hand pages. For page numbers, I used the standard Blurb function to place them in similar positions to the headers but at the bottom of the page, using bold black 10 pt Arial font. I realised that some of the page numbers might be obscured by the black surround of some album pages – but decided I would deal with that once I’d got everything in place.

With all these preparations complete, I started assembling the contents of the book on the 1st February. It took roughly 100 hours over a 17-day period to scan all 169 album pages, check all the catalogue images against each scanned album page, and to insert both album page scan and relevant catalogue image into the BookWright application. Conveniently, the last stamp I was waiting for to complete the album arrived on the penultimate day of scanning after a 30-day journey from Italy. I had been waiting for it for three weeks before messaging the vendor, Fisicol (an Italian dealer using the Hipstamp site), asking when I could expect it, and he advised that it often took three or four weeks; and sure enough it arrived a week later. Shortly after setting the status to ‘Received’ and providing feedback, I received the following memorable message from Fisical:

I duly placed this, the last of the two thousand and forty seven Italian stamps, with some sense of achievement, into the Concessional Parcel Post section of the Italian collection, replacing the single left-hand version for which I had been unable to obtain a right-hand partner. The whole collection totalled 4084 stamps dated between 1860 and 1980, from 33 countries.

After some final tidying and checking of the whole volume in Bookwright, I sent the book for printing at a cost of £81 a copy. I now have three copies of a beautiful, glossy, 274-page, book containing an introduction and both albums – one for myself and one set aside for each for my two grandchildren which I shall give them when they are a little bit older.

I also have a PDF version on my laptop, my tablet, and my phone; and an eBook version if I need it. In addition to their portability, these electronic versions have another advantage – the images of the fronts of individual stamps can be significantly enlarged should there be a desire to inspect them more closely.

Oh, and, by the way, I did succeed in using Word’s BOOK FOLD function to print out two folios of catalogue pages which I stitched together and fixed into the back of the other countries album as shown below.

A summary idea

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In dealing with some of last year’s Xmas cards, one from an old friend made me think again how powerful summaries are. The card has a tree on the front with names of sons, daughters and grandchildren round the edges. On the back is a photo of the grandchildren; and a link to an ‘Xmas newsletter’ is on a sticker inside. It has all the hallmarks of a good summary: easy and quick to access, informative but not providing too much potentially unwanted info, and providing clear directions on how to get to more detail. I tried this out on a report back in 1985 and think it worked reasonably well – but haven’t done it since and haven’t seen anything else like it; but my friend’s Xmas card has all the hallmarks. In these days of information proliferation such approaches ought to be researched, taught and practised widely. Some people may think that AI will be able to do this for us; but, be clear, we’re not talking about a simple ChatGPT textual summary – this involves graphics as well as careful selection of content. The question is not whether AI will be able to do this; its whether the result will be any good or not. For the immediate future we would be better advised to focus on educating people in the art of summarisation.