A Seat Where the Model Is Written: Objects of Affection Collection Joins the CIDOC CRM Special Interest Group

On joining the group that maintains the CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model, what we brought to it, and a blank field on our own entry in its register

Objects of Affection Collection is an institutional member of the CIDOC CRM Special Interest Group. The group admitted us by unanimous vote on 6 October 2026 and named us among its new institutional members in the wrap-up of its 63rd meeting three days later. We are now listed on the group's own members page, which means anyone reading this can check it rather than take our word for it. I am the institution's designated representative.

The membership belongs to the institution rather than to me personally. That distinction matters more than it sounds: it means the seat outlives whoever is sitting in it.

What the Group Is

The name is opaque unless you already work in documentation, so it is worth a paragraph. The CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model is the shared vocabulary that museums, archives and heritage projects use to describe cultural objects in a way another institution's system can read. Without something like it, every collection is an island. It is published as an international standard, and CIDOC itself is the International Council of Museums' committee for documentation. The Special Interest Group is the working body that maintains the model. It meets, it argues, it takes proposals on a public register, and it decides what the model says next.

Membership is participation. The group has not reviewed our work and has taken no position on anything we have published, and we will not describe it as having done so.

The Question We Brought

Records are built to hold what is known. They are much worse at holding what somebody went looking for and did not find.

A conservator examines a painting and the examination settles nothing. A registrar asks a donor where a piece came from and the donor genuinely does not remember. A researcher spends three weeks in an archive and establishes no fact at all. In each case real work happened. It was skilled, it was expensive, and it produced no answer, so in most systems it produces no record either, and the next person repeats it from the beginning.

The deeper problem is that the result is indistinguishable from a question nobody asked. An empty field says we do not know. It does not say whether that is because nobody looked, because somebody looked and found nothing, or because somebody looked and chose not to say. Those are three different facts about an object and one blank space.

We put that question to the group this month. It was heard, it was not resolved, and the group asked us for more cases. That is a normal outcome and a useful one, and it is not a decision in our favour.

What We Hope to Bring

Three things, stated as intentions rather than as achievements.

Cases from the commercial side. The evidence in front of the group comes overwhelmingly from museums and archives, which is where careful documentation people work. But a great deal of what happens to an object happens in the trade, and the trade records differently. A dealer's disclosure about an uncertain provenance is often made in conversation, during exactly the window when it could still change a buyer's decision, and reaches writing only once a transaction becomes official, if it ever does. That is not an ethical failure. It is a gap between the moment a fact matters and the moment the record catches up to it, and it is the thinnest part of the evidence we have seen. We can bring those cases, with the permission of the people who supply them, named the way each of them chooses to be named.

Practice at small scale. Standards are mostly written with large institutions in view, because large institutions have the staff to send to meetings. The holdings we work with are small, private, and frequently in the keeping of one person, and they fail in different ways from a national museum. That is an unusual seat with a useful view from it.

Our own records, including the bad ones. We publish what we hold and what we do not, and we intend to keep doing that where the group can look at it. An institution arguing for better treatment of gaps should expect its own gaps to be inspected first, and should make that easy rather than hard. Our work on object permanence is the clearest statement of why we think this is the whole of the subject rather than a technicality.

What We Expect

Slow progress, and we are content with that. A change to a shared model is not a decision taken in a room. It is a proposal, a discussion, often a deferral, sometimes a working group, then an edit that lands in a version of the model, then a long wait while the people who build the software decide whether to follow, and a longer one while institutions migrate data they have already mapped. Years, routinely. The alternative is a standard that shifts under everybody's feet, which would be worse for every collection that depends on it.

We joined to take part in that process, not to shortcut it.

A Blank Field on Our Own Record

There is a detail in this worth more than the announcement.

Our entry in the group's register records our website, our address, our country, and a contact person. The last field is Host Organisation, and ours is empty.

It is empty because the honest answer is that there is no host. We are independent, so the field does not apply to us. But the register has no way to say that, and a reader cannot tell our deliberate blank from a field somebody simply never filled in.

That is the exact problem we brought to the group, sitting on our own line of its register, placed there by us, within days of joining. We are not reporting it as a fault and we are not asking anyone to fix it. It is the best worked example of our own subject we have ever had, and we would rather point at it ourselves than have somebody else find it.