Too Much of One Thing, Too Little of Another

The collection keeps growing

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A community archive invited residents to contribute photographs for an exhibition about neighborhood celebrations. The magnitude of the response surprised the volunteers, who received several boxes before they had finished sorting the first delivery. A multiplicity of formats complicated the work: loose prints, albums, labeled envelopes, and copied images all required different handling. There was also a plethora of nearly identical pictures from one recent event, far more than the small display could use without crowding out contributions from other years.

The organizer estimated the magnitude of the sorting task before assigning a public opening date. The multiplicity of formats meant that counting boxes alone would not reveal how much description each contribution required. A plethora of repeated images could be valuable as a record, but it was not a reason to display every one of them. The team separated its decisions about what to preserve from its decisions about what would best serve a visitor's short encounter with the exhibition.

Original fictional passages for vocabulary practice.