Collection Thinking

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.

Introduction; 1. Ontology; 2. Incautious Stewardship of Library Collections: Creating Collections Where They Don't Exist, Losing Collections Where They Do; 3. Indexing Intimacies: The Affective Collections of André Breton and Samuel M. Steward; 4. Collecting Children in Coraline and Harry Potter; 5. Edible Enigmas: Food Riddles and Enigmatical Bills of Fare; 6. A Variantology of Research Collections: The Residual Media Depot; 7. Situationist Stuff: Collection as Explanatory Accumulation; 8. Agency; 9. Audible Collections: What Remains of Voices on the Radio; 10. Collection as Biography: The Pierre and Annie Cantin Collection; 11. "The Relics...What are they?": Locating Florence Nightingale in her Childhood Library; 12. Creating, Collecting, and Curating: Mothers Pass Down Barbie Traditions; 13. Collecting Copies: The Fabiola Project by Francis Alÿs; 14. Audio Aficionados: The School of Collecting Very Old Sound Recordings; 15. Community; 16. Made to Move: Convent Embroidery Collections and Communities of Care; 17. Collect Them All (Again): Digital Collection as Nostalgic Incentive in Fire Emblem Heroes; 18. Off the Grid: Exploring the Human Networks in Underground Art Making and Collection Building; 19. Finding Fireweed: Magazine Metadata as Archive of Feminist Movement; 20. The People and the Text: An Inclusive Collection; 21. Raging: Revisiting Raging Dyke Network; 22. Conclusion, or How to Use this Book Now That You Have Read It.