Collections of physical objects, such as in libraries, galleries, and museums, have the property of "random incompleteness."
Random Incompleteness arises from the fact that collections are put together as a result of a series of historical accidents.
An item's provenance is usually an odd confluence of the eccentricities of the collector and the buying opportunities on a pubic or private market: the death or indigence the artist, heir, family, or any string of post hoc collectors; the conquest of a city by an opposing army; legal entanglements; or more or less outright theft.
As a result, the distinct physical objects - the works of an artist, group, period, movement or style - will be physically scattered, and any one collection will not only be physically incomplete, in that it does not have all such works, but this incompleteness skews the context and perceptions of the original works.
It represents a bygone world in which accurate knowledge of, and physical travel to, the places in which these works originated was difficult, expensive, and impossible for all but the wealthiest and most adventurous -- that world before 'Eighty Days Around the World,' before the arising of Abundant InfoWorld.
From the Teaching Perspective
To a teacher trying to teach, this random incompleteness means that being forced to use any particular collection hobbles, always to some degree, their ability to select items for educating.
There will be random gaps in items needed that will have to be filled from some other source. A teacher may need other angles of a picture, a close up or detail, other works by the artist, or related artists, or works from the same town, country, period, or even different cultures altogether.
Where will that source be?
Anywhere or anyone. Any teacher, any student, any tourist. Any book, any colleague's slide.
To the teacher, what matters is that it is driven by pedagogical need, not the exigences of the collection process.
No collection of physical objects could hope to have this level of completeness, not even collections of collections.
When faculty complain about the expensive online software products built around collections, they say things like, "It doesn't have the other version, the right angle, the different lighting, the related items I need, the proper context."
And it never will.
But their answer is unfortunately to attempt with limited, yet expensive, resources to build a competing private collection of their own; to fly around the world on sabbatical and take the pictures they want (at least to the extent allowed to) and then keep them to themselves. To build yet another collection suffering from Random Incompleteness.
Individual faculty have their own collections, departments have their own collections, school libraries have their own collections, consortiums have their own collections -- and all do and will suffer from Random Incompleteness.
They are doing today's job with yesterday's concepts.
Building The Ultimate Collection
Indeed the only way to overcome this inherent property of Random Incompleteness is to create the collections of all collections that are and then engage every interested person to fill in the gaps: a universally shared, crowd-sourced collection. (Sound familiar?)
But this is entirely doable in the digital world -- if the "owners" of those objects start to realize that the images of the thing are not the thing -- if they start to understand the principles of information at work in Abundant InfoWorld are not those based on the hoarding of a physical object.
What we need is not more sets of independent, limited item and limited access collections of reproductions of items in collections, but total open access to the ultimate complete digital collection from which we can choose anything according to teaching and learning needs.
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