1st Edition

Collection Thinking Within and Without Libraries, Archives and Museums

Edited By Jason Camlot, Martha Langford, Linda M. Morra Copyright 2023
    364 Pages 32 Color & 26 B/W Illustrations
    by Routledge

    364 Pages 32 Color & 26 B/W Illustrations
    by Routledge

    Collection Thinking is a volume of essays that thinks across and beyond critical frameworks from library, archival, and museum studies to understand the meaning of "collection" as an entity and as an act. It offers new models for understanding how collections have been imagined and defined, assembled, created, and used as cultural phenomena.

    Featuring over 70 illustrations and 21 original chapters that explore cases from a wide range of fields, including library and archival studies, literary studies, art history, media studies, sound studies, folklore studies, game studies, and education, Collection Thinking builds on the important scholarly works produced on the topic of the archive over the past two decades and contributes to ongoing debates on the historical status of memory institutions. The volume illustrates how the concept of "collection" bridges these institutional and structural categories, and generates discussions of cultural activities involving artifactual arrangement, preservation, curation, and circulation in both the private and the public spheres. Edited and introduced collaboratively by three senior scholars with expertise in the fields of literature, art history, archives, and museums, Collection Thinking is designed to stimulate interdisciplinary reflection and conversation.

    This book will be of interest to scholars and practitioners interested in how we organize materials for research across disciplines of the humanities and social sciences. With case studies that range from collecting Barbie dolls to medieval embroideries, and with contributions from practitioners on record collecting, the creation of sub-culture archives, and collection as artistic practice, this volume will appeal to anyone who has ever wondered about why and how collections are made.

    Preface

    Susan Pearce

    Introduction

    Jason Camlot, Martha Langford, Linda M. Morra

    1. Ontology

    Jason Camlot

    2. Incautious Stewardship of Library Collections: Creating Collections Where They Don’t Exist, Losing Collections Where They Do

    Joshua Hutchinson

    3. Indexing Intimacies: The Affective Collections of André Breton and Samuel M. Steward

    Peter Dubé

    4. Collecting Children in Coraline and Harry Potter

    Colette Slagle

    5. Edible Enigmas: Food Riddles and Enigmatical Bills of Fare

    Nathalie Cooke, Anna Dysert, and Merika Ramundo

    6. A Variantology of Research Collections: The Residual Media Depot

    Darren Wershler

    7. Situationist Stuff: Collection as Explanatory Accumulation

    Johan Kugelberg (with Jason Camlot)

    8. Agency

    Linda M. Morra

    9. Audible Collections: What Remains of Voices on the Radio

    Katherine McLeod

    10. Collection as Biography: The Pierre and Annie Cantin Collection

    Valérie Bouchard

    11. "The Relics…What are they?": Locating Florence Nightingale in her Childhood Library

    Geoffrey Robert Little

    12. Creating, Collecting, and Curating: Mothers Pass Down Barbie Traditions

    Emily R. Aguiló-Pérez

    13. Collecting Copies: The Fabiola Project by Francis Alÿs

    Georgia Phillips-Amos

    14. Audio Aficionados: The School of Collecting Very Old Sound Recordings

    Patrick Feaster

    15. Community

    Martha Langford

    16. Made to Move: Convent Embroidery Collections and Communities of Care

    Anna Wager

    17. Collect Them All (Again): Digital Collection as Nostalgic Incentive in Fire Emblem Heroes

    Alex Custodio

    18. Off the Grid: Exploring the Human Networks in Underground Art Making and Collection Building

    Hélène Brousseau and Jessica Hébert

    19. Finding Fireweed: Magazine Metadata as Archive of Feminist Movement

    Felicity Tayler

    20. The People and the Text: An Inclusive Collection

    Deanna Reder and Margery Fee

    21. Raging: Revisiting Raging Dyke Network

    Nicky Bird

    22. Conclusion, or How to Use this Book Now That You Have Read It

    Jason Camlot, Martha Langford, Linda M. Morra

    Index

    Biography

    Jason Camlot is a Professor of English and Research Chair in Literature and Sound Studies at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada.

    Martha Langford is the Research Chair and Director of the Gail and Stephen A. Jarislowsky Institute for Studies in Canadian Art, a Distinguished University Research Professor in the Department of Art History, in Concordia University (Montreal), and a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.

    Linda M. Morra is a Full Professor in English at Bishop’s University, Sherbrooke, Canada.