THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED to the concept of “collecting” and its shifting meanings in a digital context. It explores in what ways individual collectors and collecting institutions such as archives, museums, and libraries have espoused various forms of data processing; it offers insights into the practice of collecting as a cultural phenomenon and how this practice changes in an era in which computers are ubiquitous and the Internet dominates our time; and it discusses what is being collected in the digital domain, why digital objects are different from non-digital ones, and what it means when we “collect data.” Its essays and case studies examine the practice of collecting in a digital context from the perspectives of art historians, media and cultural-studies scholars, preservationists, museum theorists, librarians, and computer scientists.

The Western idea of “collection” signifies an intentional and selective accumulation of like elements, may they be physical objects or ideas and experiences. The all-encompassing meaning of “collecting,” correspondingly, ranges from shopping lists to address books, from remembering days past to focusing on the here and now, and from sorting comestibles to tracking debts. Almost unfathomable in its breadth, “collecting” requires conceptual framing to avoid its use as an imprecise, hollowedout metaphor. Such frames have been outlined in the past to think about “collecting,” but they failed to capture the idea of collecting in all its multifaceted manifestations. As a result, each of these preliminary and heterogenous frames exist largely in isolation from one another. For example, psychologists point to the prominent role of collecting in the development of the self and stress the mirroring of subjects and collected objects; historians emphasize the sociopolitical circumstances in which collecting rose to prominence among cultural elites; and economists investigate the significance of collecting in consumer societies, considering the cycles of “acquisition, possession, and disposition” of goods that constitute and dissolve what is called a “collection.” Each of these unique conceptual frameworks, however, introduces an additional feature of collecting, namely the role of influential agents—members of the nobility, wealthy merchants, naturalists, curators, gallery owners, librarians, and archivists— who began to collect for the benefit of the collection.