Category Archives: JOURNEYS IN PROGRESS

Preservation Maintenance Plan LITE template

Posted on by
Reply

Addenda to ‘Preservation Planning’

In 2021 I published v3.0 of a set of Preservation Planning templates which were designed to enable a rigorous Preservation regime to be applied to large collections of digital documents and their accompanying hardcopy material. However, in my recent investigations into the combination of collections it became apparent that a simpler and quicker approach would be more appropriate for multiple smaller collections with less complex formats. Therefore, a new Preservation Maintenance Plan LITE template has been produced and initially tested on two sets of 10 collections each. Further testing will be done over preservation cycles in the coming years, prior to issuing a version that can be said to be fit for purpose.  In the meantime, the current version is available for use at the link below.

Preservation MAINTENANCE PLAN LITE Template – v1.0, 09Sep2025

A Lite Touch

Posted on by
Reply

In the previous post I identified a need to understand the additional digital preservation requirements of the overall combined set of collections. To investigate this, I listed all the individual collections in a spreadsheet and noted some points which have a potentially significant impact on preservation work, including:

  • Does the collection have an index? (if there is no index there is no way to check the inventory – the items themselves define what is in the collection).
  • Does the collection have digital items with or without physical equivalents, and/or physical items with or without digital files? (when an item exists in both digital and physical form, there is more preservation work to do).
  • The number of digital and physical items (there is substantially less preservation work to do on a folder of 30 digital items, than there is on a collection of 500 digital items of which 175 have physical equivalents).
  • Whether there is any duplication with other collections (If a collection is part of a larger set of objects which already has a Preservation Plan, there is no need to specify a separate Preservation Plan for it).

Having populated this Preservation Asessment spreadsheet with its long list of 38 collections that might need Preservation work I was filled with some dismay as I’ve now had several years of implementing Preservation plans on many hundreds, if not thousands, of objects: it’s time consuming and exacting work. I knew that I needed to minimise the time and effort on this new set of preservation activities if it was going to be workable and successful. Furthermore, I also realised that for many of the collections on the list I was not really that concerned about the long term: they were accessible currently – many without needing an index, required little intervention, and might be of little interest many years hence.

With these thoughts in the back of my mind, I went through the list deciding what preservation work, if any, was to be done on each collection. Fortunately, 8 of the collections either already had a Preservation Plan or were part of one of those which had; I discounted another one altogether as it only had one insignificant digital file; and another seven were part of another collection on the list. I also combined 3 of the remaining 22 collections into a single overall Healthcare collection (because there were fewer than 90 files across them all), and 2 of the Book collections into a single overall Physical Books collection (because I knew the two would need to be done together). Finally, I added one other collection to the list – my other general laptop folders which I concluded would also benefit from being under the control of a preservation plan. Consequently, I was left with 20 collections to define Preservation Plans for. This was far too many to be practical, and, in any case, the more I looked at the digital files involved, the more I realised that they mainly consisted of pdf, jpg, png, doc/docx, xls/xlsx,, and ppt/pptx formats – not very problematic. For the most part, an eyeball check would be all that was necessary to identify doc, xls, and ppt files that needed converting to docx, xlsx, and pptx respectively, so the detailed 16-step process required in my comprehensive Preservation Maintenance Plan template would be overkill. I needed to create a LITE version of the Preservation Plan with fewer steps and capable of addressing multiple collections. What I came up with were the following 4 steps:

  • Populate a ‘Changes’ section with the significant changes that have occurred to the collection and its digital platform between the previous maintenance exercise and the maintenance you are about to carry out.
  • Populate a ‘Hardware and operating system strategy’ section with the strategy you envisage for the future.
  • List the collections you want to undertake Preservation activities on in a ‘Contents & Location’ section together with the specific actions you want to take for each one (for example, ‘Check file extensions’ or ‘check inventory’).
  • Record a summary of the actions taken and associated results for each collection, in an ‘Actions taken’ section.

With this structure in mind, I separated the 20 collections into two groups – one which included substantial numbers of physical objects, and one which consisted mainly of digital files. The result was two Lite Preservation Plans each dealing with 10 collections (it’s just coincidence that each have the same number of collections).

The actions specified for each collection were established by assessing what I wanted to protect against for each collection and how much effort I was prepared to make. Six different types of possible actions emerged:

  • Check file formats: Check that the current file formats will enable the files to be accessed in the future, and if not make changes to ensure they will.
  • Check Inventory: Check that the index entries have a corresponding physical item and/or digital file, and rectify any inconsistencies.
  • Ensure physical docs are up to date: Ensure that the physical documents are the latest versions.
  • Ensure Index is up to date: Ensure that the latest additions to the collection are included in the Index.
  • Ensure Digital collection is up to date: Ensure that the latest additions are all included in the digital collection.
  • Ensure Physical collection is up to date: Ensure that the latest additions are all included in the physical collection.

The two Preservation Plans fully populated with the results of the preservation work carried out on them can be accessed at the links below:

Objects Preservation Maintenence Plan Lite dealing with 10 collections

Files Preservation Maintenence Plan Lite dealing with 10 collections

The preservation work, as specified and recorded in both plans, took approximately 20 hours over about a week. This included filling in the Plan documents with the results as each collection was tackled. Overall, the main actions taken were:

 1,976 .doc files converted to .docx: 1,937 of these were converted in bulk using the VBA code kindly provided by ExtendOffice (see https://www.extendoffice.com/documents/word/1196-word-convert-doc-to-docx.html). The remainder were simply opened in Word and saved as .docx files. (a few of these were originally .rtf files).

150 .xls files converted to .xlsx: 141 of these were converted in bulk using another set of VBA code provided by ExtendOffice (see https://www.extendoffice.com/documents/excel/1349-excel-batch-convert-xls-to-xlsx.html), with the remainder being opened in Excel and saved as .xslx files ( a few of these were originally .csv files).

564 files deleted: 464 of these files were in an iTunes folder – and I no longer use iTunes. 36 were CD case covers/spines which I created in an application I no longer have – and the CD covers are all now printed out and in place on the CD cases so I no longer need these files. Most of the remainder were odd files which I no longer have a use for. As is apparent from this description, such files tend to be from folders containing more general material rather than specifically collected and indexed items. Many computers probably have an array of such unneeded material.

Around 9 new items added: 7 of these were added to get a collection up to date, and the others were the two new Lite Preservation Plans which were included in the Backing-up collection.

2 Hardcopies updated: One was a physical A5 ring binder of the addresses in my address database; and the other was my Backing-up and Disaster Recovery document which I print out and keep a copy in my desk drawer. It’s really a bit of an effort to update such documents regularly and so they often get out of date. Having a scheduled Preservation Plan does help to keep them relatively current.

The next cycles of these two Preservation Maintenance Plans are now scheduled for 2027 and 2028 respectively: I can now relax, confident that I have done as much as I wish to future-proof the 20 collections that they deal with.

I have included most of my workings in this post largely to help me be clear of what I did. However, the details are of little consequence to readers interested in undertaking digital preservation work on their collections. They only serve to show that you can call anything a collection, and that you can cut and dice collections any way you want. The key point is that, using this approach, it is feasible to exert a measure of preservation control over a large number of collections, including the files on your computer, with relatively little effort. If you try this out, you may find this Preservation MAINTENANCE PLAN LITE Template helpful.

Published!

Posted on by
Reply

Events have moved on apace since my last post three weeks ago. For a start, the publication date moved in stages out to 7th August before coming back in to the 4th August, and the Waterstones web advert which had vanished, reappeared. Then, suddenly, on Saturday 28th June we received an email from the Production Editor saying that the book had been published with information available at https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-031-86470-4. We have subsequently received a Congratulatory email from Springer and this together with the website information provides a revealing example of how academic publishing is now operating.

The Congratulatory email includes advice on how to ‘Maximize the impact of your book’ and offers use of ‘a suite of bespoke marketing assets to help you spread the word’. Also included was a link to a PDF version of the published text. The Springer site advises that the ebook (£119.50) was published on 27June, the hardback (£149.99) on 28June, and that the softback will be published on 12July 2026 (price not yet specified). The site also provides a list of the book’s chapters, each of which can be opened to reveal the summary abstract we had been asked to provide, and the full set of references together with any digital links we had included. Each chapter can be purchased separately for £19.95, or one can take out a Springer subscription for £29.99 a month entitling you to download 10 Chapters/articles per month (which, interestingly, would get you pretty much the whole of Collecting in the Icon Age!). Those with appropriate credentials may also be able to login via their institution and get content for free if the institution concerned has come to a separate arrangement with the publisher.

Since hearing that the book has been published, I’ve been working on the supplementary material we are providing in the pwofc website. This includes a single document containing all the references each with an appropriate web link. In searching for such links over the last week I’ve noticed that in several cases, extracts from our book are already appearing in the hit lists. Furthermore, I discovered that previews of many pages of the book (including the whole of chapter 1) are available in Google Books ‘displayed by permission of Springer Nature. Copyright’. All this in less than 7 days since publication.

Two things stand out to me from all this: first, there is a surprisingly large amount of information available for free about the book. It is probably not sufficient if you really are interested in the subject – but you can get a pretty good idea about what the book contains. Second, there is clearly a focused effort to monetise the publication in every possible way.

Now that we’ve achieved publication, I don’t intend to provide any further running commentaries on progress. The material we are providing to supplement the book is in the Icon Age Collecting section of this website, and that is where we intend to conduct any dialogues about the book that should arise.

Plot profile for the movie ‘Eerie AI’

Posted on by
Reply

Gronk Pistolbury knew quite a bit about AI. After doing a Phd on ‘Extreme perturbationery and calmic episodes in deeply embedded AI neuron nodes’, he had moved around various high-profile organisations operating LLMs (Large Language Models) in the 2020s and 30s. During those years he had continued to develop his Phd ideas, and, by the mid-2030s, had come to the conclusion that something odd was going on.

His research was based around the analysis of AI hallucinations, and he collected instances of the same from both his own vast bank of automatically generated content, and from whatever other sources reported such an event. His analysis of this material had started to show up similarities and even some duplications across the more recent data sets – and Gronk couldn’t figure out why. He suspected that the hallucinatory material was going back into the internet data pool and affecting the content of the LLM – but he had no real evidence to back up his theory.

In 2038, he had used a large chunk of his savings to take out a three-year subscription to the Jonah Vault – the most extensive and advanced AI Data Centre conglomerate in the world; and to acquire an extremely powerful computing configuration for his own home. His idea was to test out his theory by using the Jonah Bank to produce enormous numbers of AI outputs for analysis by his own specialised system. The analysis would identify hallucinations and map similarities between them – and insert them back into the training data for his own LLM in the Jonah Vault. This was to be done at scale – over a billion instances a month.

By 2041, his research was beginning to show some significant convergences in hallucinatory events; but his Jonah Vault lease had only a few weeks to run and he had no money available to continue to fund his work. It was at this point, however, that Gronk Pistolbury won the Inter-Continental Lottery and pocketed a cool $7.9 billion.

2041 was also the year when Quantum Computing became truly commercially accessible. There had been a few start-ups in the late 30s offering both hardware systems and cloud services. However, it was the arrival of Quiver inc. in 2041, that made Quantum a practical and affordable alternative to conventional digital systems. Gronk took out a $500 million, one-year service contract with Quiver and hired half a dozen of the best quantum/compute engineers he could find, and built a quantum version of his hallucination test bed.

When Gronk set his Quantum operation going, he had hoped that it would significantly speed up the circulatory process of hallucination production and LLM development. However, the system was far more powerful than he had dared hope. It reduced the cycle time by tens of thousands. After 3 months operation it became clear that the LLM was converging on a relatively small number of answers to any question asked of it; and after 6 months it was down to a few hundred characters. Needless to say, the answers now bore no relation to the questions that had been asked. In puzzled awe, Pistolbury and his engineers watched in fascination as the LLM continued to narrow its answers to the questions put to it relentlessly by the Quiver Quantum machine. Finally, after 7 months, 26 days 14 hours, 9 minutes and 4.278 seconds the LLM settled on its final answer to any question about anything – 42.

They had seen it coming but couldn’t quite believe it would happen. It was bewildering, weird, crazy, eerie, but the hallucination machine had said that the answer to any question was 42; and some 63 years earlier, Douglas Adams had said in The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy that the answer to the great question of Life, the Universe and everything was 42. From that answer onwards the hallucination model LLM would give no other answer to any question. It did not reduce the number or change the number or add to it. It stayed, unmoving, at the two characters that a humorous author had just thought up on the spur of the moment in the previous century.

…Should the movie be a success, a possible sequel could follow Pistolbury over the following three decades on an epic quest to understand what had happened, by undertaking a whole variety of way-out experiments producing eerie LLM results. For example, neural node pairing, star refraction hypnosis, and, in all its gory detail, LLM brain fluid crossover.

Note: All of the above is pure fiction. None of the names or dates or scientific claims are real (and some of the science bits don’t even make sense!). Should any of this material find its way into AI answers, it will be because it has been purloined for AI training data; and it would be a graphic example of AIs inability to distinguish reality from fantasy. This little idea for a (really bad) movie plot might even end up playing a supporting role in an AI hallucination… now that would be amusing!

Revised Proofing

Posted on by
Reply

Despite me thinking that the proofing process was closed, Springer sent us ‘Revised Proofs’ on Saturday 7th June to check and return by Monday 9th June. This was good news as far as I was concerned as it provided opportunities to both check that the proofing changes we had specified had all been done correctly (and, indeed, I did spot 27 shortcomings); and to specify a further 15 changes which my continuing checks on the references had identified (I might add that the vast majority of all these changes were relatively minor involving changes to only a few words, if that). This time round, we had been asked to specify changes in annotations to a revised PDF, so I used the pdf callout facility to document the change needed in a box with an arrow next to the relevant text. My co-author, Peter, had work priorities over these few days, so the changes – and anything missed – are all down to me.

I duly submitted the annotated proof around 9pm on the night of Monday 9th June; and the next day we received an email from Springer acknowledging receipt of our comments and saying that they would review and incorporate them in accordance with Springer’s guidelines after which they would proceed with the online publication process. I’m not too clear with what ‘the online publication process’ entails; nor do I understand why the publication date continues to move – as at the date of this post in Springer’s web site it currently stands at 26th July. However, I do think that the proofing process is now truly complete. In an interesting development, Waterstones appears to have pulled its web page advertising the book, and I wonder if that is because of they have grown impatient with the continual movement of the publication date. Beck-Shop and Amazon, however, are still offering the title.

What bonuses (and companies) are for

Posted on by
Reply

I believe most large organisations these days have a mission statement; and the ones I’ve seen usually include words about providing excellent products and customer service. However, my own experience in recent years seems to suggest that many large organisations are now just dedicated to growing their businesses and making more money – despite what they say in their mission statements. Products just seem to get smaller (for example shower gel in a different but smaller bottle) or worse (tins of baked beans with sausages that now taste completely different and not as nice), and customer service is mostly abysmal (for example, long phone wait times, and bots instead of people). Furthermore, Chief Executive bonuses often seem to be tied to how much money is made. I wonder if any organisations tie their CEO’s bonus schemes to all the elements of the organisation’s mission statement. Would it make a difference if all organisations did that as a matter of course?

Some Combination Consequences

Posted on by
Reply

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.

Proofs Submitted

Posted on by
Reply

The proofs for Collecting in the Icon Age arrived, as scheduled by Springer, on Friday 9th May in the form of a web site providing unformatted web pages for each chapter which could be edited to a certain degree. In addition, formatted versions of each chapter were provided in separate PDFs. We duly completed the editing after getting answers to some queries; and we submitted the revised chapters yesterday morning.

We were advised to provide comments adjacent to issues for which no editing functions were available, so we hope these will be sufficient to prompt the revisions we want. We also requested changes to the layout of some figures and tables, but they are subject to house style, so we are less confident that they will be enacted. However, we have done all we can – the proofing process is now closed. The only remaining influence we can have on the book is if Springer asks us questions or asks us for advice on specific points.

The Springer web site is currently advertising 6th July as the publication date – though this does seem quite fluid – a week or so ago it was 3rd July and then it went to 10th July for a day or so. However, the site has been consistent in advertising a softcover version and an ebook version – though no prices are provided. I also believe the book’s chapters will be available for purchase separately – but have seen no information about that. I have no idea if anything special happens on the day of publication, though I’m hoping we will be sent our copies of the book on the day or shortly afterwards. The next couple of months will be an interesting eye-opener for me of how contemporary publishers operate.

Some Photo Collection Assumptions

Posted on by
Reply

Addenda to ‘Organising Family Photos’

For the last ten years or so, I have been diligent in including the photos we receive from our family through social media and messaging, into our Photo collection. This endeavour has required me to request, a) more often than not, a higher res version than the one that has come via social media, and/or b) further information about the contents of the photo i.e. the people, places, or events that are being portrayed. Often, I would need to request the dates of the photos as well because that information seems to get lost when a photo is downloaded into the social media systems we use most – WhatsApp and FaceBook. Inevitably this has been a rather painful process – particularly when there were more than four or five photos involved. Responses were sometimes slow in coming, and replies sometimes hinted at an undercurrent of annoyance at the work that would have to be done.

My requesting of additional information had gone on since photos started coming through social media, and it was typically a tortuous process. It wasn’t that my offspring were unwilling to help, but it was time-consuming for them – and they didn’t fully buy-in to the idea that their photos needed to be an integral part of our photo collection. it reached a head just before Xmas last year when I was doing my regular yearly-or-so intake of new photos. At that point I concluded the buy-in was just not there, and that I was just imposing my own requirements on other people. I decided to be more selective about what I saved from social media and to be satisfied with the resolution delivered and the information that came with it. So, for example, if a photo of my grandchildren with someone else at an unspecified event arrived with a cursory description and sized at 125kb, I would include that version in the collection with a title which didn’t identify the specific event or unknown person, and with whatever date was provided in the social media message.

I recount these experiences because they relate to some general assumptions I had made when assembling the family photo collection as recounted in the ‘Organising Family Photos’ journey. To recap, the collection was assembled by gathering, indexing and scanning all the photos belonging to different elements of the family – my parents and their ancestors; my own before I met my wife; my wife before she met me together with her parent’s photos; and my wife and I’s photos after we married. Each of these four sets of physical photos were placed into sets of four differently coloured photo albums; and I reasoned that my offspring, and their offspring down the generations, would value these collections and would find them helpful in understanding where they came from and who they were.

In assembling these collections, I encountered photos that other people had sent, in addition to the photos the owners had taken themselves. These were often, but not always, photos of grandchildren and other branches of the family. I had assumed that collection owners would see such donated photos to be part of their photo collections, and consequently I had included them in the assembly, indexing, and scanning work. This was the background to my subsequent attempts to collect and catalogue photos provided to me and my wife through social media and messaging systems; and indeed, it has produced a subset of organised and indexed photos, all with information-rich and accurately-dated titles, which provide a rich historical record through a period of about thirty years when our offspring were leaving home, finding partners, and having children. I have no doubt they will enjoy looking at this record sometime in future years, but that is not the point. They will see it is a bonus, not a necessity fulfilled.

Another assumption I made when I was assembling the collection, was that if I provided a flexible structure for the indexing and albums, then other members of the family might maintain their own indexes and albums within the overall structure. However, not only has there been no interest in employing the flexible structure, family members do not seem to undertake any detailed cataloguing of their photos at all – so far as I know. One of the reasons for this is undoubtedly that a) these days people take and receive hugely greater numbers of photos than they ever did before, and therefore the workload in cataloguing is now very much greater than previously, and b) the facilities for retaining, organising, and searching for photos, both in mobile phones and in photo-sharing systems, are now very much better than ever before. In the face of these two changes, it is unsurprising that the workload-heavy approach I have been using to maintain our family photo collection, has not been taken up by family members, despite the fact that a template framework for the activity has been fully worked out and documented, and is easily accessible.

Having said all that, what of our Family Photo Collection, that I envisaged would be passed on down the family generations? Well, at present the physical collection consists of some 76 albums and is increasing by roughly one album every year (only a subset of each new crop of photos goes into the physical albums). This is now a HEFTY collection of physical volumes requiring a bookcase of its own. I haven’t asked any of my offspring how they feel about having to take it on when we die, but I suspect they might find it inconvenient, if not an imposition. Furthermore, the fact that a more comprehensive digital equivalent is available may make the eventual disposal of the physical volumes more likely. However, these too are simply my assumptions which, as we have already seen, have often proved to be incorrect.

The collection as it stands, provides a history of the family from the 1870s – some 150 years. In principle this would be of interest to family members of the future: it would enable them to get a sense of where they came from and to have a picture in their minds of what their ancestors were like. My assumption has always been that people instinctively want to know these things – though I do also believe, that, once people know the information is available, they have less interest in finding it out and examining it. This line of reasoning suggests that having a family photo collection going back 150 years will satisfy the instincts, but will not inspire any detailed inspection of its contents nor any particular regard for its worth; but, again, these are only my assumptions.

The fact that the complete collection is in digital form does provide a number of downstream opportunities that are not afforded by the physical album collection. In particular, a copy of the digital collection can be given to each offspring down the generations. It will take up relatively little digital space, will be easy to access, and will provide rich information in the file titles. As such, it ought to be a desirable asset, worth having and preserving and passing on. It may only contain the photos from a particular 150 year era; but it may inspire future owners to selectively add photos from subsequent times. However, future digital capabilities may bring more far-reaching opportunities. In particular, AI would seem to have all the capabilities to add additional material to the collection automatically. The cataloguing format – an Index Entry (Ref No, Description, and Date) and File Title (Ref No, Description, and Date) – is clear and simple and well within the capabilities of a Large Language Model (LLM) AI, let alone a future more all-singing, all-dancing version. There would, of course, be the danger of an LLM AI producing hallucinated index entries and titles, and even actual photos, so owners would ideally need to be checking what is produced, and that may not be done as diligently as it should. Nevertheless, it seems quite feasible that a collection could be grown in that way.

Unfortunately, the larger the collection grows, I can foresee that future generations will have less desire to fully explore its contents. However, that perhaps is immaterial: the contents will always be there to answer a query or to satisfy a general desire to explore the family’s past. It doesn’t have to be thoroughly explored to be useful. Interestingly, there are probably some comprehensive family photo collections that do already extend through the generations and which could be used to explore what the current downstream offspring think about them. The example that immediately comes to mind is the British Royal Family, and no doubt there are other Royal or Wealthy families which have similar extensive collections assembled and maintained by paid curators. The views of the offspring would be atypical because of their circumstances, but might, at least, throw a little light on the matter. Perhaps such research already exists – I haven’t investigated that question myself.

I have been able to muse about the future of our photo collection because it does actually exist as a whole family collection which can be easily passed on through the generations. This is not so true of photo collections that exist on people’s phones or in some cloud system. It is not clear what will happen to such collections in the decades to come. No doubt some will get passed on, and perhaps some AI in the future may organise and research them in some way; but they will, initially anyway, be less coherent and will represent only a narrow subset of the family. Having said that, there are now so many photos being produced and stored in the world that it is difficult to foresee what will happen to them all in the centuries to come.

This post has been all about the assumptions I have made – and continue to make – while organising and adding to our family photo collection. Here’s a summary of them – with some notes about their validity.

  1. My offspring, and their offspring down the generations, might value our family photo collection. Notes: the jury’s out on this. None of my offspring have expressed any more than passing interest in the overall collection.
  2. Collection owners consider donated photos to be part of their overall photo collections: Notes: I know my wife takes this view because she actively saves such photos; but I don’t really know whether my offspring do or not.
  3. Other members of the family might want to collect their photos within the framework of a family-wide indexing scheme. Notes: this notion was wildly wide of the mark. There has been no interest whatsoever.
  4. My offspring might feel it inconvenient, if not an imposition, to have to eventually take over the photo collection, especially as it grows in size. Notes: perhaps they may become more positive about it as they grow older – it seems to me that age does seem to spark interest in the past.
  5. The fact that a more comprehensive digital equivalent is available, may make the eventual disposal of the physical volumes more likely. Notes: Only time will tell.
  6. People instinctively want to know where they come from and to have a picture in their minds of what their ancestors were like. Notes: there’s probably been loads of research on this – but I haven’t investigated.
  7. Once people know that the information they want is available, they have less interest in finding it out and examining it. Notes: it would be interesting to see if there’s been any research on this.
  8. The family photo collection going back 150 years will satisfy the instincts of my offspring, but will not inspire them to make any detailed inspection of its contents, nor to increase their regard for its worth. The larger the collection becomes, the more likely this is to be the case: Notes: none of my offspring, as yet, have undertaken a detailed inspection of the collection.
  9. My offspring will think that the digital family photo collection which is easy to copy, easy to access, with information in the file titles, and taking up relatively little digital space, is a desirable asset to have and pass on down the generations. Notes: only time will tell – there has been no discussion in the family about this.
  10. Even if future generations have little desire to fully explore all the collection’s contents, they will still value having it available to answer a query or to satisfy an occasional desire to explore the family’s past. Notes: my offspring and their children do sometimes look at particular albums.
  11. Having a copy of the family photo collection – even if only in digital form – might inspire my offspring to selectively add photos to it in the future. Notes: only time will tell.
  12. AI will have the capability to add additional material to the collection automatically in the future. Notes: this may make it easier to curate the collection, but I, personally, would not have confidence in its reliability until it had been shown to work over an extended period.
  13. Photo collections that exist on people’s phones or in cloud systems are less likely to be passed on down the generations. Notes: only time will tell.
  14. As AI becomes more widely integrated into computer operating systems, it may take over the task of managing photos, and this may well increase the likelihood of photo collections being passed on down the generations. Notes: this is a double-edged sword – AI may help a collection get reliably passed down the generations – but will the objects in the collection, and the information about them, be genuine, valid, and true?

One final point: my acknowledgements must go to all the members of my family who are unknowingly providing the observations upon which I am basing my thoughts and opinions. I have only once explicitly sought their views (that was when I was assembling our photo collection back in 2015). Other than that, I may be misrepresenting them. If so, I apologise.