2013-07

Idee VERGEETmeNIET angemeld bij Diversity Idea Competition (https://www.at-diversity.eu/) , funded by the European Union.

There is no subject you can think of or there are people collecting it. From passionate amateurs who prefer to work in solitude on their contribution to mankind, to associations of (semi-)professionals who fanatically share their interest. They spend their lives collecting objects and information about the objects. All together they represent an enormous source of energy and expertise. Cultural Heritage Institutions could make good use of the enthusiasm, knowledge and time of these collectors. They have enormous backlogs in documenting their collections and are forced to concentrate on the parts they consider the most valuable. For every subject in their collection though, even the most obscure ones, there is a collector somewhere who knows everything about it and could potentially help out. The question of how to exploit this potential is not easy to answer. Simply inviting the collectors to add their information in the systems of the institutions doesn’t seem to work. Obviously there has to be something in it for the collector as well. Maybe the Cultural Heritage sector should first of all invest in tools that collectors can use within the comfort of their private systems. If they make sure these tools produce reliable and durable content they will profit from it in the end, when the collector is willing to share.

Cultural Heritage (CH) institutions are, in the analogue world, at the top of the food pyramid of collecting. They are the Final Authority in a complex selecting process where valuable objects and collections surface over time. They can only play this role because there is an infrastructure of passionate amateurs, private collectors, associations, galleries and auctioneers that do the preselection for them. With the introduction of digital media the CH Institutions face new challenges. Apart from collecting artefacts they have to collect and manage digital objects and digital information about their objects. On top of that the online community claims access to their entire collection and question their natural authority. If we want to make sure CH Institutions keep playing their role in the digital era, we should create an enhanced digital version of the successful collecting pyramid. We should make clever use of the new possibilities digital media offer us. If we want to create the digital collecting pyramid we should start at the basis; the (amateur) collector. If we provide him or her with the right help to ensure accessibility and durability, we reinforce our central position and profit from it in the end.