re: D.G. Myall collection ...

I wonder if they will try to break Doug's collection
into segments ?
Just the thought seems close to Blasphemy.
If they do, I hope some lots will be inexpensive enough
for the average Machinista to afford.

re: D.G. Myall collection ...

A Master Collector ended a recent lecture/presentation with a few principles of collecting.

One, oft-mentioned, is that condition never gets better, so always buy the best.

Another, less common, is to never donate anything to a museum as it will be lost to philately forever.

Putting the far future aside, let's look at this in terms of the last few decades:

In the past, most items in private hands would come-up for sale in every generation (if not more often), which meant that motivated collectors could acquire that material for their own collections & exhibits.

These sales, necessarily, generated an ocean of auction catalogs - easily available to any collector at nominal cost - with descriptions and, over time, more & better illustrations of all that museum-worthy material.

Lastly, the exhibits 'circuit' meant that the vast majority of collectors would - from time to time, at minimum expense for travel - be able to see, up close, the level of material that makes it into competitive exhibits.

Contrast that with museums, philatelic & otherwise:

Q/ What fraction of their holdings have ever seen the light of day?

Q/ What fraction of collectors can travel to that museum at that magic moment?

In general, scholars & journalists, travelling on someone else's dime, are better-off when there are large, centralized repositories of whatever they need a look at.

But is the hobby?

Cheers,

/s/ ikeyPikey (who is mindful of the coming deluge of comments about archival storage conditions, but who thinks that the hobby is in more danger than it's stamps)

re: D.G. Myall collection ...

Donating collections to a museum would be nice but odds are that the collection won't be seen again. How about selling the collection and give the proceeds to the museum of your choice. As Ikey said

I have a collection of auction catalogs of material I will never see or own but it is nice for reference.

Vince



wrdv.org/

re: D.G. Myall collection ...

Digitizing the archives would go a long way towards making museum piles accessible, and they are welcome to argue for continued contributions on the grounds that anything digitized at a MajorMuseumDotCom is inherently more accessible than the same material digitized at PlayleDotCom or DenmanDotCom.

I have seen some minimalist museum digitalizations, with barely a title added to an item number and locator code ... what would greatly extend their interpretative/educational reach would be crowdsourced notations.

Come to think of it, if memory serves there is a New York City digital collection (maps? photographs?) that encourages users to add what they know, especially identifying details.

Cheers,

/s/ ikeyPikey