Category Archives: JOURNEYS IN PROGRESS

Figuring on playing to your Age?

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Recently, a couple of people at my golf club have spoken to me about playing a round with a gross score that was equal to or lower than their age. One had just managed it, and the other would have done if one hole hadn’t been closed. Over the years several people have told me about their desire to achieve this feat; and I would certainly like to – though, being realistic, I’m probably not good enough. Anyway, these conversations got me thinking that a measure indicating how close you are to achieving it might be quite easy to calculate and maintain in the automated scoring and handicap systems that we use these days. It could simply be the gross score minus your age. To take account of courses having different par ratings, the score could be multiplied by course-par divided by 72. So, the formula would be: Gross Score x (Course Par/72) – Age. It could be called the RoundAge number (capital A to distinguish it from roundage which apparently is a local tax paid by a ship for the ground or space it occupies while in port). For example, if a 75-year-old got a gross score of 82 on a par 72 course, the RoundAge would be 82(72/72)-75 = 7. If, by some miracle, the golfer had a stellar round of 74 gross the following week, that RoundAge would be 74(72/72)-75 = -1. The RoundAge could be calculated for every card recorded, and averaged over each year to provide a longer-term graphical view of progress.

20 Years of Loft Experience

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In a previous Loft post I concluded that I didn’t need an RFID capability. So, with that question out of the way and having explored most aspects of operating a Loft system over the last 20 years or so, I’ve decided it’s time to draw some conclusions and to move this journey onto the Kcompleted list.

Key facts and figures

First, here’s a summary of the design of the system, the contexts within which it has been used, and some approximate overall statistics about its use in the 20 years between 2005 and 2025 (note that estimates have been used to compensate for errors and omissions in recording – see errors section below).

  • The system involves placing numbered Items or Containers into labelled Positions. All Positions, Items and Containers have an entry in an index.
  • Lofts in two different houses have been used – both affording 32 different Positions between the rafters.
  • During the period there have been two adults living in the house, 2 teenagers growing up and leaving home, and one elderly relative staying for 6 months in the course of moving. All these individuals have contributed to the loft’s contents.
  • About 469 items were indexed of which 352 were removed after an average stay of about 5 years. The 119 items currently in the loft have been there for an average of about 9 years.
  • About 91 Containers were indexed of which 57 were removed after an average stay of 8 years. The 35 Containers currently in the loft have been there for an average of about 13 years.
  • Just 16 of the items and 10 of the Containers which were indexed when the Loft system was first setup in January 2005, continue to be present in the loft after 20 years.

What to keep and where to keep it

Although this journey has focused on Lofts, the findings can be applied to any domestic storage area – a garage, a spare room, an outhouse etc. The investigation has been about using such spaces to store items which are not in day-to-day use but which a householder wants to keep. Deciding what to keep and what to throw away is central to this activity, and I think I’ve usually erred on the side of keeping. However, I’ve also found that over a period of years I’ve changed my view on some things and disposed of them. So, a periodic review of the contents can be worthwhile.

There are some general criteria which I’ve realised are worth considering when deciding to store things in a loft, a prime one being, will it go through the loft hatch? Others are: If the object is of great sentimental value wouldn’t it be better on show in the house than buried in the loft (for example two inscribed tankards)? If the object is useful, wouldn’t it be better somewhere accessible in the house (for example spare stationery items).

I’ve also found that sometimes I’ve tended to keep things in the loft longer than needed simply because they are difficult to dispose of. For example, pieces of an expensive shelving system which we are unlikely to ever have a use for, but which we can’t find anyone who wants them and which seem too good to simply take to the dump. For such objects, I think it’s probably better to take a decision than to procrastinate for years – though that’s sometime easier said than done. Some disposal problems can be purely practical such as the need to cut up over 100 CD data disks – a task which I spaced out over several days because it hurt my hand using the heavy-duty scissors.

Of course, in a family household the items being stored may belong to different individuals. In our case about 58% of the items were owned by myself and my wife, about 36% by our children, and the remaining 6% by an elderly relative. Of course, we experienced the typical problem that parents have when their children move out – getting them to remove all their belongings. We still have some things that we believe are worth keeping but the individual is reluctant to take.

Designating Containers and general packaging considerations

The system I’ve been operating requires the objects being stored to be designated as either Items or Containers. Containers might be empty (like suitcases), or contain other Containers (such as a small suitcase in a large suitcase or a small box in a large box), or contain one or more Items. Items may be one individual thing (like a card table) or a collection of several things (such as 100s of music CDs). When I initiated the loft system, I tended to separate Containers from Items quite rigorously. For example, the box of old Rolling Stone and Boy’s Own magazines was indexed in two parts – C7 for the cardboard box they were in and Item 10 for the magazines. Now, some 20 years later I have removed the Container C7 from the index and relabelled the combined box and magazines as Item 10: the reasons being that a) the box is only ever going to be used to house the magazines, b) looking up the reference on the Container label just tells you what the container is, but having a combined item number on the label on the box enables you to find out what is being stored, and c) managing two index entries when just one will do is just extra unnecessary work.

I recount these details as I’ve realised that deciding whether to combine container and item or to keep them separate is important because it can help to minimise effort and maximise usefulness. The rule of thumb I now apply is that if the contents are to be indexed as a single Item, and if they are likely to stay in the loft for several years, then I combine the Container and the Item, and index and label it as a single Item. An addendum to this is that if one Item consists of several objects of the same type it is probably more effective to store it on its own: that way it will be easier to manage and to find.

Regardless of the above deliberations, I always try to enclose Items in some sort of packaging to avoid them getting dusty and/or eaten by rodents. Over the years I have used suitcases, cardboard boxes, tubes, shoe boxes, plastic bags, long transparent solid plastic containers, and long bags that carpet comes in. Some of these have been indexed as Containers and some have just been made an integral part of the item. The Items I have stored without any covering are usually pieces of furniture (like a coffee table, wallpaper table, or kitchen chairs).  Generally speaking, I’ve found it best to store Items with minimum folding or rolling because over the long term those characteristics temd to become embedded in the objects concerned. I have facsimiles of two old copies of The Times rolled up in a tube, which have to be held or weighted down to stop them from rolling up again when they are being read. I’ve also stored large sheets of bookbinding cardboard upright in a cardboard box leaning against a rafter, but over time the box and the boards bent. All of these items would have benefitted from being stored flat.

Managing the organisation of the physical objects in the loft

It is important to clearly label the Positions where the Containers and Items are to be placed. The Positions should be clearly differentiated from each other so there is no ambiguity (I use the loft rafters as the delineator) since it is the Position numbers that enable the Items to be found. Containers and Items should not be placed across two or more Positions except in special circumstances (for example, I have a large number of spare empty boxes which are indexed as a single item but which fill 3 separate positions).

I write Container and Item labels on both sides, and I place them so that their labels are showing and closest to the front of the position. To facilitate this, I take care not to stack too many Items or Containers on top of one another or behind each other. This also helps to minimise the number of Items/Containers that have to be moved to access the one you want. If an Item consists of more than one object I package them together with a single label; however, if the objects are not packaged together, I give each one the same label with the same information. Of course, it is important to label an Item or Container with the correct label as specified in the Index.

I have found that, over time, Items consisting of large numbers of the same things (particularly packaging Items such as a box of small boxes, or a collection of boxes) may get very disorganised and need sorting out. In doing so I take the opportunity to discard unwanted items, and to organise the objects in such a way that they are easy to see and access.

Managing the Index

I personally think that an Index is essential when operating this kind of loft system. Having tried operating an index on both a laptop and a mobile phone, I would definitely advise having one on a mobile phone I would definitely advise having one on a mobile phone since it can be taken with you and used on the spot when you access items, change their positions, and make changes to their contents. A variety of suitable database apps are available (see my earlier posts on this issue), most of which will enable you to specify whatever fields you want. The fields I am currently using are: Description, Type, Item Serial Number, Container Serial Number, Position Serial Number, Item Category, Item Owner, Item or Container condition, Container this Item or Container is placed in, Position this Item or Container is placed in, Date this record was created, Container Security Status, Date removed from loft, Photo. I believe a photo is essential – and, of course the app should enable you to use the mobile phone’s camera to capture the image.

I try to ensure that every object in each Positions is included in the Index – unlabelled objects may get forgotten about and effectively lost. I also try to ensure that all changes to Containers and Items are reflected in the Index; and, indeed, the flexibility of the Index makes it easy to accommodate such changes – you just have to be diligent and remember to make the changes. However, being the humans that we are, we sometimes forget, and we often make mistakes – as described in the next section.

Errors in operating the Index

I’ve made many errors in the course of using our loft system, and perhaps the most common has been simply not updating the Index when a change has been made or an Item has been removed from the loft. This problem is often exacerbated when other people (such as offspring!) who are not so aware of the system or committed to its upkeep are involved. However, even when I have remembered to make changes, I have sometimes updated records incorrectly. Indeed, I know I have actually created some Index records with incorrect information, though, so far as I know, I have only duplicated an Item number once.

In short, unless you are super diligent, you will probably make some mistakes in the course of operating a loft system. Therefore, it is useful to do a stock check from time to time – maybe every five years or so. Doing so also provides a useful opportunity to reassess whether you do actually want to continue to keep storing some of the items being checked.

General Approach and Best Practice

  • Find an Index app for your phone.
  • Specify the storage area and the positions within it.
  • Index the positions and label them.
  • Try to enclose Items to be stored in some container or packaging to prevent dust and rodent damage.
  • Record every Item being stored, in the Index.
  • Where items consist of many of the same objects and are to be stored for the long term, combine the objects and their container into a single Index Item.
  • Include a photo of every Position, Item and Container in the Index, but keep a separate set of Photos elsewhere in case you need to change apps (exports are usually available in transferable csv format which is unlikely to include photos).
  • When changes occur to the physical Items and Containers, make the associated Index changes immediately on the phone.
  • Undertake a stock check every 5 years or so and while doing so consider disposing of unwanted Items or Containers.

Conclusion

I’ve found our Loft system to be a very useful and effective way of storing the large number of things that we don’t need on a day-to-day basis. However, it does take time and effort to set up; and it does need diligence to keep the physical space in order and to keep the index up to date with the changes that are made. The mobile phone has made operating such a system a much more practical proposition.

Preservation Maintenance Plan LITE template

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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

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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!

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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’

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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.