A few days ago, I completed the Preservation Maintenance exercise for the PAW-PERS and SUPAUL-PERS collections. Actually, these two collections no longer exist separately – they were merged together into a new Mementos collection in last years Combining Collections journey. During the Preservation work, I encountered a few issues directly related to the increased scope of the Mementos collection, and to the way I combined all my collections. They are listed in the bullets below and subsequently described in more detail:

• File pathnames exceed system limits
• Varied ways of filling in fields
• Preservation Maintenance is a bigger job
• More Preservation Maintenance work is required
• Backing up becomes more complicated

File pathnames exceed system limits:  MS Windows limits pathnames to 256 characters unless you make a change to the Registry. When I combined collections, I deliberately included the contents of a folder in the folder title to make navigation easier, for example, ‘Documents/PAWCOL/Family History (Archive, Mementos, Display Case Items, Photos, Recordings, Story Boards, Trophies)’. This resulted in very long path names when combined with file names with a lot of detail about their contents (for example, ‘MW-BKS-0001-02 – 4 smaller books – The Rubryat of Omar Kyam, The language of flowers, A preliminary course of First Aid, and a midget English dictionary’. The titles of files which exceeded the 256 limit still remained visible, but there were two undesirable impacts: the file wouldn’t open in my PDF app and seemed to cause the app to stop opening other PDF files as well. Secondly, the ‘Copy as path’ function which I was using to compare the file titles with the index entries, wouldn’t produce the correct file name, for example, the MW-BKS-0001-02 file shown above came out as  ‘”C:\Users\pwils\Documents\APAWCOL\FAMILY~1\Mementos\MEMENT~3\MW-BKS~2.JPG”. I decided not to go with the registry change to rectify this as I’m not sure how it would affect the PDF app, and, in any case, I’m not familiar with messing about with the Registry. My priority is to get the PDF app working again properly and permanently. Consequently, I have started to take out inessential information from the relevant file titles to have them come in under the 256 limit.

Varied ways of filling in fields: The Mementos collection has combined 5 different collections – all of  which had different ways of providing information in the ‘Physical Location’ field. Consequently, the Excel Filter drop-down list of different physical locations was very large and varied. So, I imposed a standard whereas all physical locations started with terms like Study, Chest, and Loft; and with a standard form of subsequent words. This is an obvious point, but when you combine several collections into a single index a degree of normalisation work is inevitably necessary.

Preservation Maintenance is a bigger job: when my two collections PAW-PERS and SUPAUL-PERS were separate collections with separate indexes, I had conducted Preservation Maintenance on them separately in previous years and had separate Preservation Maintenance Plans for 2025 for each of them. They contained about 800 and 750 items respectively. However, the new Mementos index/collection now not only contains their 1550 items but also about 550 items in the CONTRAB collection and another 220 items in the Computer Artefacts collection – a new total of about 2320 items. Furthermore, the physical items in each of these four main elements are all stored separately in different locations and in different ways. Inevitably this vastly increased number of diverse items has meant that the Preservation Maintenance exercise for the new Mementos collection took a great deal longer than the previous separate exercises, and was a good deal more complicated. This makes a difference because Preservation Maintenance seems like an overhead task, and the bigger and more complicated it is, the less motivated the owner may become to undertake it. It seems there may be trade-off between combining indexes to make them easier to manage and access, and making the Preservation Maintenance easy enough to be carried out regularly and reliably.

More Preservation Maintenance work is required: Before combining collections, I was only undertaking Preservation Maintenance work on four collections all of which have indexes – PAWDOC documents, Photos, and two separate sets of Mementos. Having combined all my collections, I now have some 40 collections which potentially need Preservation Planning work – many of which have no index. This is a potentially huge increase in work – though, at this point, I don’t really know what is required and whether it is best to deal with all these additional collections together or in smaller separate groups. One key criteria to be considered will be which Preservation arrangement has the greater chance of actually being enacted and not just simply put on one side as being too difficult or time-consuming. I will have to investigate the implications and will document my findings in a subsequent post.

Backing up becomes more complicated: As documented in earlier posts, in combining collections I have made considerable use of shortcuts. For example, within the ‘Entertainment Recordings (Movies, Music, Spoken Word)’ section there are shortcuts to the Windows Videos library, the  Windows Music Library, and to the Spoken Word folder within the Windows Music library. So, just copying the contents of the ‘Entertainment Recordings (Movies, Music, Spoken Word)’ folder will not provide an adequate backup. Care will need to be taken in specifying and carrying out backups to ensure that copies of the appropriate material are actually taken.

The final consequence of reorganising my PC collections was that it made me review my Will. Being over 10 years old, it was out of date; and, furthermore, I thought it important to reflect the new PC structure in the bequests relating to digital collections.

The general advice that I’ve read about writing a Will is that all bequests should be included in full detail in the document itself. It is feasible to refer out to another document but this must be in existence at the time, and must be the same version at the time the will is executed. Amendments can be made to a Will using a so-called Codicil, and this mechanism would presumably enable a new version of an exterior document to be specified. However, Codicils must be witnessed in the same way that a Will itself is witnessed, so this is not a quick and easy process. [I should make it clear at this point, that I have not taken professional advice on this, and my interpretation of any of these points could be wrong.]

When I drew up my first Will ten years ago, I realised that, while the bequests relating to items in my collections could be relatively specific, an Executor might still have trouble identifying them in my study. So, I elected to provide an Additional Document and referred to it in the following very general terms, “My Executor may be guided in the location and distribution of these items by the document “Paul’s Stuff” stored as an Excel electronic file in the “XXX” folder in my laptop.”

Having looked again at the guidance, and considered the bequests I had made previously, I decided that I would take the same approach again – mainly because the collections are not particularly valuable, and because I think such a document would be helpful to the Executor. This time, I already had the format and contents of the previous version of the Additional Document to work from; as well as the newly reorganised PC structure. So, first I revamped the Additional Document by considering all the collections in the order that they appear in my laptop files; then, from this updated spreadsheet, I derived the actual bequest statements that would go into the will itself.

My Additional Document has the following fields:

Ref No: a reference number in two parts – a main category number and sub numbers for each of the elements it contains, for example, 14.3

Type: This field provides the owner’s suggestion of how the items might be valued by those who are inheriting them, and can be any one of the following:

• Family Information: Of little value to anybody outside the family
• Family Heirloom:     Keep until the family wants to realise its value or to dispose of it
• Temporary value:    May have some immediate use and then has no value
• Has value:               Somebody, somewhere, may want this
• No value:                 Can be thrown away

Description: This is either the name of the general Category of an item (for example, ‘Photos’); or a description of the item concerned (for example, ‘The family photo collection which contains photos and family videos from the 1870s to the present day’)

Location: This contains clear details of the location of BOTH the Physical objects concerned AND the digital objects concerned even if some of the digital objects simply replicate the physical objects or vice-versa.

Preferred Destination: The person (or organisation) to whom this item is being bequeathed.

Alternative destination: A suggested alternative person (or organisation) who could be given the opportunity to have the item IF the Preferred Destination person (or organisation) says they don’t want it.

Note that I parcel together both the Physical and Digital versions of a particular object; this has the practical implication that a bequest always includes both versions unless explicitly specified otherwise. I believe that without such an approach there could be complications in unravelling what happens to digital equivalents.

While the use of an Additional Document has undoubtedly helped me update my Will, there is no guarantee that it will help if my collections change. It will accommodate small changes in the contents of collections which are referred to in more general terms such as ‘stamp collection’. However, if the bequests in the Will itself become in any way inaccurate, either the Will has to be rewritten or a Codicil produced. A new version of the Additional Document will not be sufficient to officially change a bequest. However, if there is no dispute among the recipients (and I expect that to be the case for these collection items, most of which have relatively little value and which family members have expressed no interest in) such an Additional Document might be all an Executor needs to distribute the deceased’s belongings. All such considerations need to be taken into account when creating a Will’s bequest texts.

Wills are not the only circumstance in which some documentation of collection contents is required. If you want to take out insurance you may need to provide details of the items concerned; and likewise, if you need to make an insurance claim. If you are burgled, the police will require a full description of what has been taken. In both cases, the indexes I have set up will be a good start: information can be extracted from index documents, or from screenshots of folder or file names. For the latter, the information itself can be copied from folder or file names by using the Windows ‘Copy as Path’ function, and then edited in a text document or spreadsheet. The digital photos or scans of physical objects in the collection are even better descriptors. In fact, in this reorganisation of my collections, I find that it is these two things – indexes and digital versions of the objects – that have been driving the structure: in the folder for each collection, I have tried to provide an index of some sort and a sub-folder containing the digital objects. In this way, it is either clear that one or both of those things is available, or that one or both are missing; and in the latter case it begs the question ‘why not provide the missing material’. All this is helpful to the cause of having information available for insurance company or police, should you require it.

Having established a new file structure for the 40 collections I wanted to accommodate, I set about making indexes and the digital objects themselves, as visible and accessible as possible. I used three  different types of indexes – a document containing a list of the objects, a set of folders with index information in the folder titles, and a set of files with index information in the file titles. In each case, access to the index was provided either by placing the index, or by placing a shortcut to the index, into the relevant collection folder. The table below shows the number of instances of each type that are employed in the overall set of collections.

Another way of creating an index is to piggyback one collection’s index on another collection’s index. This is what I’ve done for the ‘Other Display Case Items’ collection which is identified by the term ‘Other Display Case Items’ in the facet column of the Mementos index. In similar vein, two indexes can simply be combined as I’ve done in two cases. In one, I’ve merged the indexes of two separate Memento collections (my own for before I was married (1366 entries), and the other for myself and my wife (870 entries) into a single spreadsheet making it much easier to manage and to conduct searches. The digital objects still have different Ref Nos prefixes enabling them to be distinguished from each other. In fact, I now have 4 different collections recorded in the Mementos Index, all with different Ref No prefixes, and all with their files kept in separate sub-folders. In the other case, the separate Publications, Significant Work Reports, and Certificates & Trophies indexes (containing 68, 98 and 41 entries respectively) were combined into a single word document and the collection renamed the ‘Trophy Gallery’ collection.

This combination of different indexing approaches and the ability to either locate the actual index, or a shortcut, in a collection folder, provides a great deal of flexibility in the work required to creating and maintaining an index, while enabling very quick access to the index information whichever approach is taken.

The use of shortcuts also provided a very useful aid in the storage of digital objects associated with collections. In three particular cases (Music, Videos and Photos) the collections are located in separate libraries in the Windows File Manager, take up many gigabytes of storage, and, in the case of Music and Photos, comprise hundreds and thousands of files respectively. To be able to leave them where they are, and just to refer to them with a shortcut, was a much easier option than to have to physically relocate them. Another very important advantage in leaving them in their separate libraries is that the backup of the Documents library will be much quicker, and will take up considerably less space which means that I will not be so worried about a potential lack of space in the destination of the backup.

Interestingly, shortcuts have played much less of a part in cross referencing between collection objects. This is because you want to spot a cross reference while you are looking at a particular object – you don’t want to have to go looking for a separate shortcut file – indeed you wouldn’t necessarily even be aware that a separate shortcut file exists. Hence, cross references are best defined either in indexes, or as links on some text or images. I have cross references in the indexes for 12 of my collections – though none are in a specific cross-reference field. Instead, I have used fields such as ‘Notes’ or ‘Comments’ or have simply added a cross reference in brackets at the end of a description or a title. For the most part these cross references specify Reference Numbers – it doesn’t work so well with a general description or a lengthy pathname. I am still musing on whether to add a specific Cross-Reference field into some of my indexes.

Regarding links on text or images, I have only employed this technique a couple of times. First, in this Blog in which it is invaluable in referring to other posts and to supporting files; and second, in the Story Boards collection in which the approach was integral to the Story Board concept: the things that an object reminds you of are placed around it on a single page, and then further information about that snippet is available via a link to some back-end material. Its very effective. I may use more of the link approach now that I have an established and comprehensive digital structure for all my collections such that I’m confident that the objects will stay in the same place for quite a while and that the links are unlikely to get broken.

The reorganisation of the digital versions of my collections hasn’t affected the display of collection objects a great deal – though it has prompted me to put additional folders into the Windows Lock Screen function. Previously I had only included the Paintings, Drawings and Collages collection, but I’ve now added the Computer Artefacts, Other Display Case Items, Mementos, and Photo collections, and these four have added well over 26,000 extra objects to be displayed when the PC is inactive. It’s easy to add items into the Lock Screen function since it will accept high level folders and will display the items at the bottom of the folder tree. A final point about displays is that at some point in the near future I’m going to have to rearrange the way all these collections are displayed in my iPad to reflect this newly reorganised master structure in my laptop. A disconnect in the way the two versions are represented would not be helpful…

I’ve just finished taking my own collection-combining medicine – and it’s produced an unexpected set of collections and a massively different PC landscape.

I started by going through the 92 collections I had previously accredited to myself and thinking about what I really wanted to be classed as a collection and how I wanted them to be categorised – dual considerations which influenced one another. The result was a surprise; not that it was different from what I expected (I hadn’t really any preconceived notions) – it was just very new. I’d elected to have 40 separate collections in the following 11 categories:

As you can see, the above list is a screenshot of the second level folders in my laptop, below a top-level folder named ‘APAWCOL’ – the ‘A’ being included to ensure it sits at the top of the folder list. The names in brackets are included to make it easy to know what collections are in each category. Of course, this overall structure only emerged after an extensive process of iterative developments. Some of the more interesting decisions taken on the way include the following:

• I decided that my original desire to call my toy steam engine and its 4 attachments a collection in its own right, was simply inappropriate: it was not substantial enough. I resolved the problem by realising that the steam engine was a long-standing reminder of my childhood, and just added it into the Mementos collection.
• When I considered the various computer equipment on the original list of 92 collections, and a folder on my laptop containing various files about my hardware and software, I decided that it was important to have clarity about my digital estate – not only for my own benefit but also to assist the executor of my will after my death. Hence, I established the Computing category with Hardware, Software and Documentation collections within it, and resolved to try to make their contents look more like inventories going forward.
• I originally categorised the chocolate wrapper, Computer Artefacts, and Stamp collections as ‘Pastime collections’ but realised that could be interpreted very broadly; so, I elected to use the very specific title ‘Consumer Objects’.
• When considering the collection of Letters and Cards I realised that the address database was an important associated collection.
• The collection of dated documents concerning my interactions with doctors and hospitals has become substantial enough to constitute a collection in its own right. Having made that decision, the other healthcare material I have (some documents about Denplan insurance and others about physio exercises and the like) had to be included too so that all the healthcare stuff is in the same place.
• It has always been my intention to eventually sell a box full of old copies of Boys Own paper, Rolling Stone, and Sci-Fi monthly which resides in the loft. However, I haven’t done so yet, and the substantial number of issues of each clearly constitute collections; so, they have, for now, become official and visible collections.
• The inclusion of lottery documents as a collection may seem an odd choice, however this growing set of over 150 single excel sheets showing results for a lottery syndicate for over 20 years is clearly a collection; and it sits nicely with my previously established archive of important finance documents for pensions and the like.
• The final set – Work collections – includes the seemingly out-of-place Loft collection. However, the establishment and management of this set of objects was one of a variety of investigations (Journeys) conducted into the impact of IT on organising household objects. It is clearly a collection, but it doesn’t fit into any other category. So, it seemed appropriate to set it alongside the Journeys collection of records about those investigations.

As the above examples show, decisions about personal collections are flexible and pragmatic; they just need to make sense to the owner.

The process of creating and populating these different collections within the overall APAWCOL folder involved the movement of individual files and folders, and the creation of many folders and shortcuts. It also involved sorting out and rationalising the material that had built up over the years in non-collection folders, and some folders which had mixtures of both non-collection and collection material embedded within layers of sub-folders. I soon realised that this exercise would require a complete revamp of all the files in my PC filing system.

When I started, my laptop had libraries for Music, Photos, and Videos, and the PAWDOC folder (containing thousands of files) in the Documents library. I left all these collections alone, and simply used shortcuts to access them from the relevant collection folders.

Within the laptop’s ‘Documents’ library there were 31 main folders when I started and only 11 when I had finished. 16 of the original 31 were moved into collection folders. Of the remaining 15 main folders, 1 was the PAWDOC folder, 8 were retained as ongoing day-to-day files, and 6 were destroyed. 1 new main folder was created.

The reorganisation took me 16 days and involved the following actions:

• 233 Shortcuts created
• 5 Shortcuts deleted
• 44 folders created
• 103 folders renamed
• 109 folders and contents deleted
• 52 folders and contents moved
• 67 files renamed
• 740 files deleted
• 1444 individual files moved

I’m very pleased with the result for a number of reasons:

• It has reduced the number of main folders and made it easier to see what I have and where to put things.
• It has got rid of many files which were no longer of any use.
• It has put all my collections in one easily recognisable and accessible place
• I now have a very clear view of what collections I have and where their associated files are in the laptop

I conclude from this experience that simply having the digital elements of multiple collections together into one place on the PC is beneficial and worthwhile. However, achieving it required much more than the movement of files and folders. There were substantial implications for indexes and cross referencing, and for actually combining some collections together. These are addressed in subsequent posts.

I set out on this journey to examine all my collections to see if there were particularly useful features in one collection that might be reused in others; or if it might be advantageous to even combine collections in some way. In the last 8 posts I’ve explored commonalities in the areas of Collection Consciousness, Storage, Digitisation, Indexes, Searching, Displays, Documentation, and Relationships; and the overwhelming conclusion has to be that there are indeed commonalities – though primarily in the digital domain. It seems that people’s familiarity with computers, with using the functionality of search engines, and with storing documents and photos, has provided them with the knowledge and tools to use digital technology extensively to deal with their collections in general.

This has certainly been true in my case; furthermore, I have realised that the commonalities I have identified are not just of sufficient interest to merely write them down and describe them. No, they are of such significance that I am going to have to try to apply them in practice to my own collections. Therefore, they are listed below with a commentary on their potential use in my portfolio of collections. I shall document the results in future posts.

Identifying collections: I find that I’ve come up with one set of collections in my definition of ‘The Box’ and another set of collections in the analysis described in my post of 15^th  September. There are discrepancies between the two; for example, in ‘The Box’ I have a collection called ‘Art’ divided out into Paintings, Posters, Collages, Prints, and Sculptures. Whereas in the post of 15Sep I have ‘Paintings, Drawings and Collages’ and ‘Sculptures’. Furthermore, I also have a set of 87 digital pictures which I use as a screensaver but I’m not sure how that maps on to the other two classifications. I need to examine all my collections and categorisations and come up with a rationalised set, with each collection clearly defined.

Storage: I will assess each collection in the rationalised list to see if the collection’s objects might be stored in a better way to a) have its object on permanent display, b) ensure it is ordered appropriately, and c) to enable easy access and return of the objects.

Creating Indexes: I already have indexes for most collections – but I might consider creating an index for some of the others. The ‘Art’ collection mentioned above would definitely be a candidate. When I have established the rationalised set of collections described in ‘Identifying collections’ above, I will assess those without an index to see if an index would be appropriate.

Combined Indexes: I already have an index serving three collections, and know that there is at least one other that might be included in it. I may also consider combining my three separate indexes of Publications, Reports, and Trophies & Certificates into a single index. For completeness I will also assess the newly rationalised set of collections after it has been established to see if any indexes can be combined.

Searching: I can conduct searches on file names in my computer, so, in principle, I could search the file names of digital objects across my collections if I placed all the folders containing the digital objects for each collection in a single higher-level folder. A search on the higher-level folder would then be conducted on all the sub-folders. I might consider doing this for a subset of my collections; I don’t think it would be effective to include larger collections such as PAWDOC or Photos.

Displays: I currently make use of 4 kinds of display; physical displays such as the collections of Books on bookshelves, and Computer Artefacts in a display case; revolving displays such as the screensaver display in my laptop which is currently showing digital objects from my Pictures, Mementos and Photos collections; tablet displays such as ‘The Box’ on my iPad; and Publication Displays such as the book ‘Meteor’ that I produced and which contains all the pages from two stamp albums. When I have established the rationalised set of collections I will investigate to see which type of display might be appropriate for each collection or group of collections.

Documentation: I will assess the rationalised set of collections to ensure that, where appropriate, a comprehensive list is available to provide to the police/insurance companies in the case of a burglary. I will also revise my will and the addendum to it, to bring them in line with the rationalised collection set; and to ensure that only the addendum text and not the will itself, will require update should the mix of collections or their contents change.

Relationships: I will assess the indexes and lIsts in all my collections to see if it is appropriate to include cross-reference fields, and will add one where appropriate. This may also require  the creation of a standard way of referring to those collections which do not have a unique style of Reference Number.

This is clearly going to be a big job – I may be some time…..

It is possible – even likely – that within a particular collection and across collections there will be objects that have some relationship to each other; and that owners may well want to highlight those relationships and be able to explore them. The most basic type of relationship is between objects within a particular collection. Several examples of this exist in my Mementos collection: one is “Events and plays I went to see in 1974 including the film El Topo, the play Love Story by Colin Bennett and the Swaledale Annual Show”. All these items were given the same high level Reference Number (PAW-PERS-0040-47) and the different items given unique Reference Numbers by adding suffixes to the end (such as PAW-PERS-0040-47#2).

Relationships can also exist between completely separate items within a collection. For example, ‘PAW-PERS-0032-83    Souvenir coin of Singapore depicting Sir Stamford Raffles’ and ‘PAW-PERS-0030-12… Driving lessons in Singapore’. The relationship between these two items is identified by a Facet field in the Mementos Index specifying ‘Singapore’ in the entries for both Reference Numbers.

Sometimes, the same item gets put into two separate collections either by mistake or simply because it has a valid place in each one. For example, this item in the Mementos collection ‘PAW-PERS-0033-32   Copy of my paper on “Towards the electronic Pocket Diary” published in Design Studies, Apr1984’ also appears in the Writings (Publications) collection – ‘P25. Wilson P A, Towards the Electronic Pocket Diary, Design Studies, Vol 5 No 2, pp 98-105, April 1984.’. In this case the relationship between the two items has not been identified.

Of course, it’s possible that an item could, quite validly, be put into two or more different collections, but is put in only one of them. In this case it might be useful to know which other collections it could have been put into (and therefore which it was excluded from).

The final type of relationship is perhaps the most interesting because it may be the most hidden and/or the most difficult to identify. It is when an item in one collection has a relationship to an item in another collection. For example, in the Mementos collection index there is an entry  ‘Festival of Blues and progressive music in Shepton Mallet which I attended, 27-28 June 1970” which is actually the programme and a flyer for the festival; and in the Photo collection index there is an entry for ‘Bath festival…..’ in which two of the 10 photos are of the Bath festival. There is nothing explicit to identify a connection between these two items except for the word ‘festival’ in their respective index entries.  Many such relationships emerged in the production of my second set of Electronic Story Boards (ESBs) – particularly rather less obvious connections. For example, Story Board 24  focused on the album ‘Frank Sinatra – The Story’ in my Music collection. This highlighted the fact that a good friend of mine used to sing one of Sinatra’s famous songs ‘My way’, and that he played his guitar in a Riverboat Shuffle day we organised for our work colleagues in the 1970s as recorded in image 0091-03 in the Photo collection; the £2.50 tickets for the day are in PAW-PERS-0021-12 in the Mementos collection. I thought it very worthwhile including such a relationship in the ESB, though whether it is worth making explicit in an index field is not clear. Inevitably it ius up to the owner to make such decisions.

It’s clear that in my own collections relationships between objects abound. This may be because I have so many collections and objects, but the experience with just my single collection of Mementos of some 1200 objects, indicates that this is a generalisable phenomenon. Of course, how close the relationship is, is likely to be a limiting factor: the number of very close relationships (such as ‘the Bath festival 1970’ is probably going to be a lot less than a more general relationship such as ‘Singapore’. Whether the objects reside in the same collection or different collections is somewhat immaterial – it’s the relatability that is of interest.

There are a variety of ways in which relationships can be flagged. An obvious possibility is to have a ‘Cross Reference’ field in an index, in which the relevant Reference Number can be placed. This could be further enhanced for digital objects by specifying a link such that by clicking on the related Reference Number you are taken directly to the object concerned. However, this all presupposes that the relationships have already been identified, and to do this methodically and comprehensively is likely to be a big job (though an AI tool may be able to help in the future). An alternative is just to populate a Cross Reference field when a relationship is encountered.

Whether relationships are flagged or not, owners will always want to look for objects in their collections; and, given the possibility that relationships may exist across collections, they will want to be able to conduct those searches across the whole collection estate as easily and as quickly as possible. This requirement might affect how collections are defined, what is included in particular indexes, and where indexes and digital objects are stored in a computer’s folder structure.

Some collections are precious enough to want to physically protect them from fire, flood and burglars, and to take out insurance. Unfortunately, however, physical protection measures often reduce ease of access – especially the extreme solution of storing the collection in a bank vault; and insurance can’t get the collection back – it only provides monetary compensation. Whatever forms of protection are taken, however, it is best supported with full documentation of the objects concerned. An index and digital versions of the objects will enable full details to be provided to police and/or the insurance company.

Another circumstance  in which collection documentation is useful is when drawing up a will. This will require a clear statement of what collections you possess and what you want done with each one. This could involve passing them on to a relative, friend, or organisation; sending them for sale at auction; or even destroying them. Regardless of the chosen destinations, having a clear understanding of what collections you have and what they consist of will be an important pre-requisite to making the will; and lists, indexes and digital versions of the objects concerned will be helpful. The statements about what you want done with each collection can be made in the will proper or in an auxiliary document referred out to by the will. This latter approach enables updates to be made without having to get the will rewritten and witnessed, and can be employed by using a phrase such as the following in the will proper, “My Executor may be guided in the location and distribution of these items by the document ”XXXX” stored as an electronic file in my laptop”. I have such a document myself in the form of a spreadsheet with the following columns: Ref No, Category, Description, Location, Preferred Destination, Alternative Destination. The following note is included at the top of the document:

If the Preferred Destination doesn’t want the item, it is to be offered to the Alternative Destination; and if the item is not wanted by the Alternative Destination either, the Preferred Destination can choose the destination.

The categories are defined as:

• Family History: Of little value to anybody outside the family
• Family Heirloom: Keep until the family wants to realise its value
• Temporary Value: May have some immediate use and then has no value
• Has Value: Somebody, somewhere, may want this
• No Value: Can be thrown away

For all these purposes – police, insurance company, and will – a clear list of what objects are contained in your collections, preferably accompanied by images of the items, will be very useful. Today’s computing technology makes it easy to assemble and maintain such indexes, lists, and digital images, regardless of the type of collections they are referring to.

There is good reason for displaying physical collection objects – it enables the owner to see and enjoy them – and sometimes to show them off to family, friends, and others. I explicitly display newly acquired stamps in a small frame in front of my study desk before I put them into an album, in order to fully enjoy them before they are stored away. My book collections, too, are on display in my study on bookshelves, though, in this case, this is also where the books are stored – in my view, the ideal store/display combination. Some of my collections are simply not on physical display and have to be removed from their storage to be looked at, worked upon, and enjoyed, for example, Photos, Chocolate Wrappers, PAWDOC, and Mementos.

However, the physical objects themseleves needn’t necessarily be displayed to enjoy them. An equivalent degree of pleasure can be achieved by displaying the digital replicas. For example, for my Drawings and Paintings collection, photos of all 87 objects are displayed in my laptop’s screensaver: whenever I’m not using the laptop for a certain period the images are displayed in turn for a short period of time on the 27inch monitor on my study desk. I recently added the Mementos folder and the Photos folder to the set of images to be displayed, and random items from this combined set of three collections comprising some 21,000+ images, are now being displayed. I catch them sometimes as I pass the door or come into the study, and stand and watch, reflecting, as the images pass by. This is a very simple and effective way of bringing your collection objects to life. Of course, dedicated digital photo frames will do an equivalent job, though I have no experience of those products.

The other way I display the digital versions of objects in my collections is on my iPad as already described in an earlier post about ‘The Box’. Unlike the monitor permanently on my desk, the iPad is eminently portable and enables me to look at some of my collections elsewhere in the house, or when I’m away staying with family or friends or on holiday. In principle, the digital objects in each collection could be held separately on the iPad. However, I have chosen not to do this, but rather to present them as an overall combined set of collections, believing that this makes it easier to comprehend and to access the objects – not only for me but for others who might encounter the material.  As the post about ‘The Box’ points out, there are a variety of issues associated with presenting multiple collections together including Content and Presentation (such as to be able to display groups of objects on specific subjects rather than an amorphous mass labelled, for example, ‘Mementos’); Physicality (those objects not having a digital version); and Technical capability (for example, constraints on what file formats can be displayed). Such issues indicate that combining collections in this way is not just a matter of putting collections together, but more of a re-envisioning exercise to understand and represent a new and different animal.

The application selected will play a major part in displaying collections on a tablet (or phone) as it will dictate what can be included and how it will look. There are probably many possible candidates available other than the one I’m currently using (SideBooks). For example, Perfect Viewer is described as a very fast image/comics/ebook viewer which supports a variety of formats including EPUB, HTML, TXT, PDF, JPG, PNG and TIFF. The 99Images website in which I read about Perfect Viewer also has a link to 43 alternative apps.

A final point to remember about displays is that whatever format they take, and whichever objects they include or exclude, the original collection with all its objects still exists in the background as the primary set of material.

Searching for items in a collection in pre-computer days had to be done either by searching the physical objects or by searching an index in a document or on physical cards in drawers. In the computer age, however, searching is now a largely intellectual process, understood and undertaken by the majority of the world’s human population. It has become so because of the ubiquity of the World Wide Web (WWW) and the search engines that we use to access it. When we search collections other than the WWW, we apply the concepts we are familiar with when we use a search engine – we put in some keywords and expect to get a list of all relevant hits; and, indeed, computer technology enables us to do just that when we search our digital indexes. My indexes for the Publications, Reports, and Trophies & Certificates collections are in the Word application in which the Control-F function will identify all occurrences of the number, word or phrase I specify. Most of my other indexes, including those for Photos & Videos, Books, and Mementos, are in Excel in which Control-F will  take me to each occurrence of the specified search term as well as producing a list of all occurrences. In both Word and Excel indexes, I can choose to either search the whole of the index, or just a selected part of it; and Excel provides the additional search facility of a filter applied to a particular column. The filter shows all different occurrences within the column and enables you to select which you want to be shown in the filtered spreadsheet. I use filters a lot when searching my Excel indexes.

My PAWDOC and Loft collections use rather more specialised functionality for their indexes. The PAWDOC index is in a sophisticated database application called Filemaker which enables not only simple searches of words or phrases but also more complex functionality such as Boolean searching (AND, OR, NOT logic), and searching by date and date ranges. The index for my Loft collection is held in a specially built phone app which enables searching for numbers, words or phrases, and which produces a list of the results.

I regularly use all this functionality to search my indexes; but that is not the only way I conduct searches. Computers can also conduct searches on filenames, and this too is a powerful way of finding digital objects. It is one of the reasons why I try to always define readable and informative file titles. When conducting searches on files, computers can also search on any text that it recognises within the files themselves. My Windows PC understands and searches the textual content of Word, Excel and PDF files (though it doesn’t understand images so the contents of scanned documents cannot be searched unless they have been turned into text via Optical Character Recognition software).

The flexibility, speed and overall effectiveness of the computer’s ability to search, means that the size of an index or the number of objects being searched is no longer a constraint. For the relatively small collections owned by individuals, it is just as quick and easy to conduct searches across combined collections as it is to search within collections; indeed, its generally easier if there is just one place to go to conduct searches on many different types of collection. Of course, if this tends to produce an unmanageable number of hits then that is less productive. The only collection this has become an issue for me is PAWDOC which is managing over 27,000 diverse items in an index of some 17,000 entries which has been compiled over 40 years. Sometimes I have to conduct several searches in PAWDOC to find what I want. However, for the small-scale collections belonging to many Amateur Collectors this is unlikely to be a problem.

The ability to improve the ease and speed of searching is a good reason to have a single index for multiple collections, or to store digital objects from different collections in an overall, higher-level folder.

Indexes and Lists maintain information about each item in a collection. For me, an Index is distinguished from a List by also specifying a reference number for each item. I maintain indexes for several of my collections, and a List for one of them. Most of the indexes are substantial with several different types of information (Fields) and large numbers of entries, as can be seen from the details below:

1. Photos and Videos (25 fields, 2116 entries)
2. Mystery Books (24 fields, 121 entries)
3. Personal Books (24 fields, 301 entries)
4. Family Books (24 fields, 28 entries)
5. Work Books (24 fields, 4 entries)
6. Writings (Publications) (5 fields, 68 entries)
7. Writings (Work Reports) (4 fields, 98 entries)
8. Electronic Trophy Gallery (Trophies & Certificates) (3 fields, 42 entries)
9. PAWDOC (6 fields, 17,372 entries)
10. Mementos (49 fields, 1203 entries)
11. Computer Artefacts (49 fields, 178 entries)
12. Other Display Case Items (49 fields, 9 entries)
13. Loft (15 fields, 537 entries)
14. Stamps (6 fields, 60 entries)(this is the LIST)

It will be clear from the above list, that I think indexes are worthwhile. This view has come about primarily from my 40+ year’s-experience with controlling the 27,000+ documents in the PAWDOC collection; and continues to be vindicated as I manage the numerous other objects represented in the above table. Indexes undoubtedly take time and effort to create and maintain, but without them I wouldn’t know what I have or where to find things.

Having said that, I have deliberately avoided creating indexes for two of my collections – Music and Letters. The reason being that I preferred instead to use the folder names as a substitute. This can be very effective for a limited number of entries, since searching entails simply looking down the folder list: my Music collection has 142 folders each named with the relevant artist, and my Letters collection has 79 folders each named with the relevant person’s name. Of course these are effectively indexes with only one field. I suppose you could include more information in the folder titles to simulate the multiple fields in an index – but that would require discipline to maintain a standard format and to include all required information reliably. It would also produce much longer folder names which are more difficult to quickly look through and which may result in path name limits being exceeded for individual files. For these reasons, an index is probably a better bet for collections for which you wish to capture multiple fields of information; but, when such information is not required, a simple folder list is an effective approach which eliminates the time and effort involved in constructing and maintaining an index.

If an index is required, the trick is to minimise the effort needed to be spent on them, while ensuring that they provide the information that you want. In PAWDOC, I tried to achieve that by minimising the number of fields (to just 6) – and I believe this has been successful. Another thing I tried out in PAWDOC was to include different types of objects in the same index (rather than having separate indexes for each one), but enabling them to be clearly identifiable using the Reference number. For example, ordinary documents were given a reference number like PAW-DOC-2378-03, while 35mm slides were given a Reference number like PAW-SLI-106-01. The distinctive Reference Number had two purposes: first to be able to identify all the objects of a particular type; and second to know where a particular type of object was physically placed – either a filing cabinet, bookcase, or, in the case of the 35mm slides, a ring binder.

I have applied these learnings in the indexes to my other collections. For example, the four Book collections (items 2-5) are contained in a single overall Book index because they are all the same types of objects which require the same set of fields. In another example, though, there is no such rationale: items 11 and 12 (Computer Artefacts and Other Display Case Items) have been included in the Mementos index despite being rather different types of objects. This came about because I needed to create the index for these two items relatively recently and was faced with the choice of constructing one or two completely new indexes or of using an already existing index. I took the line of least effort and just added them into the Mementos index. The fields in the Mementos index were adequate; and I have deliberately specified Reference Numbers to distinguish these two additional other types of objects (eg. X-037-01) from the Mementos objects( eg. PAW-PERS-0647-01). I decided to use the ‘X-…’ Reference Number construct for both the ‘Computer Artefacts’ and the ‘Other Display Case Items’ collections because both are associated with the display case. However, I am still able to distinguish between ‘Computer Artefacts’ and ‘Other Display Case Items’ by the contents of the indexes’ Facet field which explicitly identifies a ‘Computer Artefact’.

The somewhat ad-hoc approaches described above are not the best way of structuring indexes, and would not do for very large-scale indexes with many different users; however, they do illustrate the flexibility that indexes afford the individual collector. Indeed, I am rapidly reaching the conclusion that, for me, the most efficient approach is to minimise the number of different indexes I have to manage, by combining as many of them as possible – even if this entails having some fields which are not used by every type of object represented in the index. The benefits of doing so are:

• Less complexity: Fewer indexes to access, organise, and manage.
• Easier searching: Clearer choice of which index to search; the ability to search more items from a single index; and less diversity in approaches to searching.
• Better maintenance: Backing-up activities will require less effort and, therefore, are more likely to get done when there are fewer indexes (and therefore fewer separate collections of digital objects). The same may also apply to undertaking Digital Preservation Maintenance work

In summary, digital technology enables indexes to support multiple different collections, thereby making it easier and more effective for collection owners to access and look after their collections.