Indeed. I made several of these points in my 2018 VCF class on collecting, particularly around the ultimate disposition of a collection. Provenance and purpose came up as very important topic around the ideas of documenting and preservation, but they also have an impact on how they will be treated once the collector is gone. All things to consider. On Mon, Aug 26, 2019 at 4:02 PM Evan Koblentz via vcf-midatlantic < vcf-midatlantic@lists.vcfed.org> wrote:
The last lesson of Bob Pease, may well be as suggested in the title of the article: "What is this stuff, anyhow?". What's to be done - if anything - with artifacts of technical work and products? Do they have value? What do they mean? Can they inform us, or simply amuse us, or do they just get in the way?
This is why, when giving museum tours, I focus hard on explaining the "so what" instead of technical specifications. Other than storage (how many of these doodads are needed to make one modern memory cards), most of our visitors couldn't care less about speed, memory, or whatever else. They want to know what is this thing and why should I care. If you don't make that point early, then you lose them.