# Slop University taxonomy decides which stamps a club can exhibit

> 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.

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.