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Objects of Affection Collection · 2026-11-03

Christopher Banks Presents Paper 79 at EuroMed2026, the 11th International Conference on Digital Heritage

Paper 79 was presented at EuroMed2026, the 11th International Conference on Digital Heritage, organised by a UNESCO Chair at Cyprus University of Technology with Heritage Malta, held online from 2 to 4 November. It was given in Session 5, digital documentation and knowledge extraction, on 3 November 2026. Its subject is a sentence a provenance record cannot currently write down: that somebody looked for a document and did not find it. The paper reports a measurement across eleven institutions, of which four publish custody in a machine-readable form at all, and sets out a change to the CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model that introduces no new class and no new property. This dispatch sets out what was measured, what the paper proposes, where it stands with the model's maintainers, and the three places it breaks.

Objects of Affection Collection · 2026-10-23

Objects of Affection Collection Joins the CIDOC CRM Special Interest Group

Admitted by unanimous vote on 6 October 2026, named among the group's new institutional members in the wrap-up of its 63rd meeting, and now listed on the group's own members page. The Special Interest Group maintains the CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model, the shared vocabulary museums and archives use to describe objects in a form another institution's system can read. This dispatch sets out what the group is, the question the Collection brought to it about records that cannot distinguish an unasked question from an unanswered one, what it intends to contribute, and the blank field on its own entry in the group's register that demonstrates the problem better than the argument does.

Objects of Affection Collection · 2026-10-23

Christopher Banks Joins Culture(s) de Mode, the French Fashion Research Network

Culture(s) de Mode is the first network of fashion researchers in France, launched in 2018 by Sophie Kurkdjian and Maude Bass-Krueger, attached to the association Filatures, Histoire et mode and supported by the Ministry of Culture. Around 450 researchers, curators, archivists, designers and journalists belong to it. In eight years it has built a directory of researchers, a bibliography written by its own members, a revue, podcasts, thematic maps of French fashion culture, and a doctoral bursary of ten thousand euros a year for three years carried jointly with the Ministry. This dispatch sets out what the network has made, and what one new individual member hopes to contribute to it.

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