It is possible \u2013 even likely – that within a particular collection and across collections there will be objects that have some relationship to each other; and that owners may well want to highlight those relationships and be able to explore them. The most basic type of relationship is between objects within a particular collection. Several examples of this exist in my Mementos collection: one is \u201cEvents and plays I went to see in 1974 including the film El Topo, the play Love Story by Colin Bennett and the Swaledale Annual Show\u201d. All these items were given the same high level Reference Number (PAW-PERS-0040-47) and the different items given unique Reference Numbers by adding suffixes to the end (such as PAW-PERS-0040-47#2).<\/p>\n
Relationships can also exist between completely separate items within a collection. For example, \u2018PAW-PERS-0032-83\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Souvenir coin of Singapore depicting Sir Stamford Raffles\u2019 and \u2018PAW-PERS-0030-12\u2026 Driving lessons in Singapore\u2019. The relationship between these two items is identified by a Facet field in the Mementos Index specifying \u2018Singapore\u2019 in the entries for both Reference Numbers.<\/p>\n
Sometimes, the same item gets put into two separate collections either by mistake or simply because it has a valid place in each one. For example, this item in the Mementos collection \u2018PAW-PERS-0033-32\u00a0\u00a0 Copy of my paper on “Towards the electronic Pocket Diary” published in Design Studies, Apr1984\u2019 also appears in the Writings (Publications) collection \u2013 \u2018P25. Wilson P A, Towards the Electronic Pocket Diary, Design Studies, Vol 5 No 2, pp 98-105, April 1984.\u2019. In this case the relationship between the two items has not been identified.<\/p>\n
Of course, it\u2019s possible that an item could<\/em>, quite validly<\/em>, be put into two or more different collections, but is put in only one of them. In this case it might be useful to know which other collections it could have been put into (and therefore which it was excluded from).<\/p>\n The final type of relationship is perhaps the most interesting because it may be the most hidden and\/or the most difficult to identify. It is when an item in one collection has a relationship to an item in another collection. For example, in the Mementos collection index there is an entry \u00a0\u2018Festival of Blues and progressive music in Shepton Mallet which I attended, 27-28 June 1970\u201d which is actually the programme and a flyer for the festival; and in the Photo collection index there is an entry for \u2018Bath festival\u2026..\u2019 in which two of the 10 photos are of the Bath festival. There is nothing explicit to identify a connection between these two items except for the word \u2018festival\u2019 in their respective index entries.\u00a0 Many such relationships emerged in the production of my second set of Electronic Story Boards<\/a> (ESBs) – particularly rather less obvious connections. For example, Story Board 24\u00a0 focused on the album \u2018Frank Sinatra \u2013 The Story\u2019 in my Music collection. This highlighted the fact that a good friend of mine used to sing one of Sinatra\u2019s famous songs \u2018My way\u2019, and that he played his guitar in a Riverboat Shuffle day we organised for our work colleagues in the 1970s as recorded in image 0091-03 in the Photo collection; the \u00a32.50 tickets for the day are in PAW-PERS-0021-12 in the Mementos collection. I thought it very worthwhile including such a relationship in the ESB, though whether it is worth making explicit in an index field is not clear. Inevitably it ius up to the owner to make such decisions.<\/p>\n It’s clear that in my own collections relationships between objects abound. This may be because I have so many collections and objects, but the experience with just my single collection of Mementos of some 1200 objects, indicates that this is a generalisable phenomenon. Of course, how close the relationship is, is likely to be a limiting factor: the number of very close relationships (such as \u2018the Bath festival 1970\u2019 is probably going to be a lot less than a more general relationship such as \u2018Singapore\u2019. Whether the objects reside in the same collection or different collections is somewhat immaterial \u2013 it\u2019s the relatability that is of interest.<\/p>\n There are a variety of ways in which relationships can be flagged. An obvious possibility is to have a \u2018Cross Reference\u2019 field in an index, in which the relevant Reference Number can be placed. This could be further enhanced for digital objects by specifying a link such that by clicking on the related Reference Number you are taken directly to the object concerned. However, this all presupposes that the relationships have already been identified, and to do this methodically and comprehensively is likely to be a big job (though an AI tool may be able to help in the future). An alternative is just to populate a Cross Reference field when a relationship is encountered.<\/p>\n Whether relationships are flagged or not, owners will always want to look for objects in their collections; and, given the possibility that relationships may exist across collections, they will want to be able to conduct those searches across the whole collection estate as easily and as quickly as possible. This requirement might affect how collections are defined, what is included in particular indexes, and where indexes and digital objects are stored in a computer\u2019s folder structure.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" It is possible \u2013 even likely – that within a particular collection and across collections there will be objects that have some relationship to each other; and that owners may well want to highlight those relationships and be able to … Continue reading