Category Archives: JOURNEYS IN PROGRESS

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.

Some Photo Collection Assumptions

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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.

The Rationale for Addenda

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This Journey contains afterthoughts on Journeys already completed. The musings have not been added to the original Journeys because those Journeys are completed and closed, and are not being reproduced in subsequent Journey hardcopy books. The Addenda Journey, however, will stay open as long as the pwofc.com website is open and I am still alive and able. Each Addenda post will be specifically related to another existing Journey in pwofc.com.

Proofs w/c 05May, Publication 02June

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We received the schedule from Springer yesterday. It’s planned to send the book page proofs to us in the week commencing 5th May, and we have 12 days to review them and provide corrections. The Springer web site is now specifying a publication date of 2nd June. In the meantime, we’re working on some supplementary material that we plan to publish elsewhere in pwofc.com also on 2nd June – the analysis we undertook to identify the practice hierarchy, an overall practice hierarchy diagram, and an expanded overall set of references.

Publication Date – 16th May 2025

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Springer are now advertising that our book – Collecting in the Icon Age – will be published on 16th May 2025. A write up of the book, its contents, authors, and the formats it will appear in, is on the Springer website. Various booksellers such as Waterstones are also advertising the book and enabling customers to pre-order it. The price of the hardback version is rather high….

We have had no communications from Springer about the detailed contents of the book as yet, but have been advised that we will be sent a schedule which will include the expected date the proofs will be sent to us.

The precious 62/100

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Sometime last December I watched some astronauts talking about their experiences of seeing the earth from afar. Some pictures like these accompanied their remarks. The earth is surrounded by its atmosphere which provides both the Oxygen fuel that we all need to live (in the Troposphere layer that is about 6 miles deep), and other layers which absorb high-energy X-rays and UV radiation from the Sun. The  approximate boundary between our atmosphere and outer space is known as the Kármán Line  and is about 62 miles up (100km). Seeing our little earth against the vastness, blackness, and relative emptyness of space (a truly appropriate name), started me thinking about that 62-mile fuel store and shield around mankind’s ship in the universe. Not a unique idea I know, but wouldn’t the effective maintenance of those precious 62 miles be the absolute top priority of the ship’s passengers?

Collecting in the Icon Age – delivered

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It’s been just over a year since Peter Tolmie and I signed a contract with Springer for a book on collecting – a year in which we’ve put a lot of work in. But at last, this morning we downloaded ‘Collecting in the Icon Age: IT’s impact on collecting practices’ to the publisher’s portal. It has ten chapters:

  1. The Icon Age and collecting practices – a primer
  2. Collecting contexts
  3. Source materials and their analysis
  4. Collecting practices
  5. IT’s impact on collecting practices
  6. The objects of collecting
  7. IT impacts on collectors forty years into the Icon Age
  8. The slide towards collecting context conformity
  9. Notes on collecting in the digital future
  10. Closing summary

I’m just hoping that it’ll still have 10 chapters and most of the contents when it emerges from the publisher’s editing machine…. Publication should be sometime in 2025.

Willing, Insuring, and Reporting

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

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

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

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

My Additional Document has the following fields:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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