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.

In this digital age we now have digital objects to collect alongside physical objects. Perhaps the type of digital object we are most familiar with is the electronic document which we create or receive and  store on our computers. Computers are widespread and collections of digital documents are commonplace. I have many among my 6 categories of document collections: Finance and Legal, Household, Healthcare, Writings, Personal, and PAWDOC. Another type of digital object that many people are familiar with is digital correspondence in emails and messages. Huge numbers of people maintain collections of these things on their computing devices or in remote cloud storage. My own Letters & Cards collection contain many such items; and, in another correspondence category, I have a collection of some 1500 email exchanges with my wife while I was undertaking a long commute with an early start. Another type of widely collected digital objects that I have is digital photos: this type of collection is now a universal phenomenon since the photos are both taken by, and stored on, digital phones.

All these collections of different types of digital object have a number of things in common: they all have file names of a similar structure, all contain standardised metadata, and can all be stored on the same device and be accessed in the same way; they can all be moved or copied to other digital devices; they can be sent to other people in emails or messages; they can be shared with other people in web sites and social media systems; and they are backed up using similar processes, and often to the same backup storage media. Such flexibility enables digital objects from different collections to be brought alongside one another and to be dealt with in the same way. While similar capabilities are available to physical objects (for example, by placing objects from different collections on the same shelf), digital technology provides a wider range of standard functions which are mostly easier and quicker to use than those in the physical world.

A second, key, feature of digital technology is that it can create digital copies of physical objects and bring them into the world of connected digital collections. The digital copies may not always be exact replicas of the real-world objects, though much depends on the type of object being digitised and the method of digitisation being used. Scans and photos provide excellent facsimiles of written material such as documents as I have discovered in the assembly of my PAWDOC collection of work files. However, for three dimensional objects such as the Sinclair ZX81 computer in my computer artefact collection, a single image provides only a partial view, and the multiple images that I have taken from different angles that are included in the collection, still don’t provide the real-world experience of viewing and handling an object in-the-flesh.

There are more expensive, and harder to use, 3D technologies which can give a more realistic impression but these are not widely used. Despite this, the digitisation of physical objects does enable such items to enjoy the flexibility and ease of use of digital functionality, and even enables physical collections to sit alongside or to be combined with digital collections. I have taken advantage of this and digitised the physical items in several of my collections including Paintings and drawings (87 objects), Doodles (about 160), Photos (about 5000 objects), Music (over 140 albums ripped from CDs) Mementos (about 1300 items), and Letters & Cards (over 1900 items). Note that all but the first two (Paintings and Photos) of these collections are hybrid collections with both physical originals AND digital originals.

At the extreme end of the practice of digitising physical objects, lies the very final action of destroying the physical object that has been digitised. This has the advantage of eliminating the need to store and look after the physical objects, and is often applied to physical document files. I did this to produce my Digitised Books collection (240 books scanned) specifically to save space (as well as wanting to explore the concept of an electronic bookshelf). Such physical collections then become true digital collections in their own right albeit with objects that are, in conceptual terms, neither physical, nor purely digital, but sitting in a class of their own.

In summary, digital technology has not only introduced a new type of object, but it has facilitated a connectedness between different digital collections; and it has enabled physical collections to enter the digital world and to also enjoy that connectedness.

Storage for physical collections can require hugely different amounts of space – everything from a huge barn for classic cars to a small box for a collection of tiny sea shells. In my case, the range is from a bookcase full of 120 mystery books to a couple of folders for a few hundred chocolate wrappers. However, it seems that whatever is collected, owners often run out of space as the collection expands. In fact, the space that is available often dictates how much is collected and how it is stored. For example, our physical photo collection is stored in standard slip-in photo albums around 25cm high. I elected to stick to this size because some of the bigger photo albums we used to have simply wouldn’t fit on the shelves of a standard bookcase. Using this standard size, the whole collection of over fifty albums sits together on a bookcase in the lounge. Physical photos that were bigger than about 20cm high are held in a folder in the loft and represented in the albums by scanned versions reduced in size. In a similar vein, the adjustable shelving in my study bookcases is set to ensure the maximum number of shelves given that just one shelf is high enough for particularly tall books; and the books are ordered to enable the tall books to sit on those high shelves. In yet another example, one of the shelves in my study tallboy wasn’t high enough to take the folders I was keeping my postmark collection in, so I sought out some ring binders that would fit and moved my postmark collection into them.

Such space constraints are probably the main drivers for where and how physical collections are stored. However, two other factors do come into play. The first is a desire to keep all objects in a collection together and in some kind of order. Hence, for my mystery book collection, I have the books ordered roughly by topic – Atlantis, Egypt, Bible, Mayans, Freemasonry etc. – whereas my Personal book collection is ordered by author and date of publication within author. The other factor is access; I want to be able to get to my collections as quickly and as easily as possible. Hence, I try to keep most of my collections in the bookcases and tallboy in my study; and just about all of my available space is used.

The storage of the digital versions of my collections is not nearly as constrained. True, there has been a problem in the past about available space, but I haven’t been bothered by this since I bought my current laptop in 2018 with a 1 Tb Solid State drive. The items to be stored are all files, and they are all stored within the standard hierarchical Windows folder system. The files are of various types and sizes but that doesn’t really make much difference. It is a simple matter to create and delete folders and to move files from folder to folder at will. I can choose to keep several collections together in a single higher-level folder; or to keep each collection in a separate folder at the highest level. Wherever they are, speed and ease of access to them is about the same.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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