What Remains: The Enduring Value of Museum Collections in the Digital Age
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Why do collections continually surprise? The simple answer for students and researchers is that collections of historic objects contain abundant information not well represented in texts or on the internet. Collections in museums, libraries, campuses and private hands offer a unique source of diversity for research, teaching and broader cultural offerings. In this paper, I look at the wealth of findings resulting from the careful study of objects, collections and provenance. I provide examples from our national science museums in Ottawa, as well as collecting activities throughout Canada. I will also describe recent research in German science collections. The close study of objects has a capacity to reveal multiple narratives and unexpected human dimensions of the past, while also connecting us to complex human relations with what remains in the present. I reflect on how collection keepers and museums can better harness the possibilities stemming from these kinds of approaches.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.012 | 0.023 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.017 | 0.044 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.027 | 0.024 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.014 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.011 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".