Collecting in the Icon Age: IT's Impact on Collecting Practices

by Paul Wilson, Peter Tolmie

Overview

This book is about the impact of the 'Icon Age' on people's collecting practices. The Icon Age is when objects began to be represented on computer screens via icons. It focuses on how the Icon Age has affected how people do things associated with collections, from their inception to their disposal and everything in-between. It also looks at different kinds of collections and how they are managed across seven key collecting contexts: accumulations; libraries; filing-systems; archives; museums and galleries; private collections; and amateur collections. To inform this, studies were undertaken of how collecting was done across a range of diverse collections. The book also presents a taxonomy of collectable object types, including new types of objects that have appeared since the onset of the Icon Age. The book draws out important lessons regarding the impact of IT on collecting practices and contexts. It also suggests that, where contexts use digital practices, these exhibit an increasing level of conformity. The book concludes by looking beyond the Icon Age to the potential impact on collecting of new kinds of computing technology.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9783031864698
Publisher:	Springer Nature Switzerland
Publication date:	07/19/2025
Pages:	294
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.25(h) x (d)

About the Author

Paul Wilson is a retired IT professional with a degree in Ergonomics, who spent 40 years working on the commercial application of computers between 1973 and 2012. He worked at the National Computing Centre in the early 1980s, investigating best practice in office automation, and disseminating the findings to UK industry in the form of books, talks and workshops. His publications from that time include ‘Designing systems for people’, ‘Introducing the Electronic Mailbox’ and ‘Introducing Electronic Filing’. His last 27 years of employment were spent as a consultant within the global systems house, Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC) where he undertook a wide range of assignments with organisations such as Budget Rent-A-Car, Nokia, the Inland Revenue, the Ministry of Defence, British Gas and Dupont. He also worked in the field of Computer Supported Cooperative work (CSCW) and was the chair of the first European conference on CSCW in 1989, as well as publishing a book on CSCW in 1991. In his last ten years with CSC, he managed large outsourcing bids. Paul has been a lifetime collector of postage stamps and more latterly of modern first edition books. During retirement he has been heavily engaged in exploring the use of computing technology in collecting a wide variety of objects in a domestic setting (such as photos, music, mementos, letters, and loft stuff); and in maintaining those collections using digital preservation practices, for which he has developed a set of template control documents. He documents his experiences in these activities in the pwofc.com website.

Peter Tolmie originally trained as a classical musician and composer before shifting his attention to the social sciences and gaining a PhD in Sociology at Lancaster University in 2003. After working for several years as an ethnographer Lancaster’s Centre for Computer Supported Cooperative Work, he spent many years working as a jobbing ethnographer for various organisations, including Xerox Research Centre Europe and the University of Nottingham’s Mixed Reality Laboratory, before becoming Principal Research Scientist in the Information Systems and New Media group at the University of Siegen in Germany in 2017. He has conducted a wide range of ethnographic studies across numerous domains, including small businesses, home environments, gaming and mobile-based artistic experiences, musical performance and music production, secretarial work, outdoor leisure pastimes, museums and galleries, the TV and film industries, bid management, healthcare professionals treating breast cancer, and journalism. He has been published widely in both journals and conferences in the domains of Computer-Supported Cooperative Work, Ubiquitous Computing and Human-Computer Interaction, is the author of a book on intimacy in domestic environments, the joint author of two books on the relationship between ethnographic work and design, and the joint editor of two published volumes of articles relating to ethnomethodological studies of work and of play.

Table of Contents

The Icon Age and collecting practices: A primer.- Collecting contexts.- Source materials and their analysis.- Collecting practices.- IT's impact on collecting practices.- The objects of collecting.- IT impacts on collectors forty years into the Icon Age.- The slide towards collecting context conformity.- Notes on collecting in the digital future.- Closing summary.