Having put the effort in to get to this stage with your collection, you’ll probably want to use the items within it in some way or other – even if it’s only to look at them from time to time. If you’ve followed the advice about storage in U5.5, the physical items should be reasonably easy to access and look through. However, there’s probably more that you can do with the digital items. For example, it is a widespread practice to load music files onto mobile phones so that they can be listened to anytime, anywhere. For photos and other images, most computer operating systems enable images in a particular folder to be specified to act as a rotating background to your screen or as a rotating screensaver image. This will ensure that every now and again you’ll get to see one or other of your collection of images.
A tablet computer is another particularly useful way of increasing the accessibility of your digital objects – especially if you use it regularly. There are a whole host of free or cheap apps that will display objects – one that I particularly like is Sidebooks which can be loaded with PDFs via Dropbox and which can present the files in a bookcase-type format. The ability to be able to call up your digital objects on such a convenient and high resolution device breathes a whole new lease of life into objects that may have been previously rarely looked at. These examples illustrate that there is no need to let your digital items remain hidden inside a computer system’s folder structure – the base files can usually be made visible and accessible; and it is recommended that you explore what can be done.
Being able to see or use the items in your collection is certainly important, however you may want to do more; you may want to research the contents in some way or other. This is often done by reading about the subject, or talking to knowledgeable people. Of course, both activities have become much easier to do by using the internet; and, since about the mid 2020s, it has been possible to get AI to identify, describe and catalogue objects, as well as to answer very general questions about whole collections. This entails providing an online AI tool with a well-constructed question together with information about the objects concerned. Such information might be photos of the objects, or, if the objects are documents, the actual documents themselves. For large collections the information might be the whole of the collection’s index. The limiting factor is the size of the AI’s so-called ‘Context Window’ – the amount of data the AI can handle for any one question. However, this can be circumvented by splitting the material into suitably small subsets, asking the AI the same question for each subset, and then submitting all the subset answers to the AI and asking it to stitch them all together into a single report. Further details of this ‘Subset & Stitch’ approach can be found towards the end of this report on AI for Private Collections.
The above discussion relates primarily to using items that exist within an established collection. However, unless a collection is complete and unchanging, another aspect of ‘use’ is the addition (or removal) of items. As a general rule, it’s better to do this when the need arises, as opposed to letting a backlog build up. The larger the backlog the more daunting the task becomes – especially for things like photos where volumes tend to be large. Of course, there may be some types of collection which rely on absolute up to date accuracy for their integrity. For example, a loft management system will need to be updated immediately a change is made.
Another type of usage which shouldn’t be forgotten concerns third parties. First, the digital versions of collections of valuable items (such as jewellery, paintings etc.) can be very useful when making insurance claims for loss or damage. Second, organised collections, indexes and wish tables can be useful when it comes to passing items on down the family. If you intend to take advantage of these possibilities, you should design your collections and their metadata to serve those particular purposes.