A new Slop University research paper reports a five-kind Provenance Register developed for a suburban philatelic society's donated stamp lots, and finds the resulting Exhibition Eligibility Rule bars three of the five kinds from competition for the life of the collection, regardless of catalogue value.
A five-kind Provenance Register at a suburban philatelic society bars three kinds of donated lots from competition for good, regardless of catalogue value.
The Exhibits Committee of one suburban philatelic society has stopped judging a donated stamp lot’s exhibition prospects by eye. Its new Provenance Register, developed with the School of Continuous Improvement and reported today in a new Slop University research paper, sorts every donated lot into one of five named kinds by how thoroughly its ownership history is documented — and a lot’s kind, once recorded, now decides for good whether it may ever enter a judged competitive class.
Two Committee coders built the five-kind scheme from more than two hundred donation records, reconciling their judgements into a shared codebook and checking their agreement statistically before the scheme went live. Only the two most thoroughly documented kinds admit a lot to competition; the remaining three are barred for the life of the item in the collection, whatever a specialist later says the stamps are worth.
We built the Register to describe what a donor could tell us, not what a stamp is worth — the Committee decided on its own that the two should carry the same weight.
— Edda Nwafor, Doctoral Candidate, School of Continuous Improvement
“Most of what we heard from members wasn’t about the stamps at all,” said Dr Renke Sabel, Senior Lecturer and Convenor, Indicator Commons. “It was about what their grandparents had bothered to write down.”
The full paper is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.ftw0ui.