Household Objects

William Davies King spends most of his time teaching theater history and dramatic theory at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Outside of work, he has another commitment: his "collections of nothing."

King’s collecting began as a young adult. Having formerly abandoned a stamp collecting book, he became fascinated with the idea of collecting “junk,” the stuff that nobody else would want.

“I was suddenly collecting all kinds of product labels and bottle caps... and then it was sort of like one thing led to another,” King said. “If you're going to collect cereal boxes, then why not collect cracker boxes? And if you have cracker boxes, why not collect the box your toothpaste comes in? It goes on and on and on.”

Over the years, he learned through trial and error the best methods to amass a history of one’s personal consumption. He found wine bottle labels were almost always too hard to remove without tearing, but keeping a piece of paper near the sink to stick fruit labels on proved to be a convenient collection tactic.

Click on the illustration below to see if you can identify some of the objects King collects and to hear him speak about his process.

While King’s commitment across decades sets his work apart, collecting is a popular hobby. It only takes a glance at social media to find individuals beginning or expanding collections of a range of niche items, from sauce packets to memorabilia of discontinued crayon colors.

For Todd Lerew, author of “On View: Unique and Unexpected Museums of Greater Los Angeles,” both private collections and ones displayed at museums have long been a professional and personal fascination. Along with the book, Lerew runs a website with the goal of cataloguing every museum in the L.A. area.

In his position as director of special projects with the Library Foundation of Los Angeles, Lerew has hosted exhibitions highlighting local museums and collections, including King’s. He said he has seen collections of a wide range of sizes and stages — from having items stored in basements to prominently displayed on exhibition walls.

“It seems innately human, this sort of interest in finding patterns in the world, the sort of pleasure of finding things that come together,” Lerew said. “Each little thing... has meaning, it has value, and if one person can recognize that long enough and find a way to share it, then other people will come around and see that too.”

Over the years, Lerew has watched as private collections and museums continue to struggle despite the service they provide their communities. In a 2024 survey by the American Alliance of Museums, only half of museums have had attendance return to pre-pandemic levels. He explained that on top of rising rents, finding others who can keep a museum open after its founders are not able to continue with it is a significant struggle for museums.

“The odds are very bad, frankly, of that continuing on after them, because it's just a lot to ask of somebody else to take on an all-consuming project.” Lerew said.

For the places that do survive, it takes not only collectors, but facilitators to keep materials accessible. Even in public libraries, not all materials are out on the shelves at all times, and it takes whole teams to pull items for visitors.

Club Materials

For Meneses, helping university students visiting the library with research has been one of the most rewarding parts of his job. He previously worked at the University of California, Irvine where a student's hope to create a science fiction club brought her to his part of the library. There, Meneses was able to help her find records UCI keeps of materials related to student organizations, including meeting minutes, flyers and publications.

“She decided to then see what people had done in the past to give her structure for what the organization could be,” Meneses said. “What did they do? What kind of parties did they have? What was their culture? What were the inside jokes?”

Meneses's position at USC has allowed him to continue his passion of helping students access and understand materials.

“I think something... that a lot of people misunderstand about special collections... is that there's this image and media of the sort of sanctity and the specialness of old things,” Meneses said. “I think, oftentimes, we're much more interested in recent history.”

Click below to hear more from Meneses on archiving ephemera from student organizations.

LGBTQ+ History

An archive that’s currently accepting donations ranging from the past to present is USC’s ONE Archives, which houses one of the largest repositories of LGBTQ+ materials in the world.

Library manager Michael Oliveira explained that in 2008, individuals trying to stop Proposition 8, which would have amended the California constitution to ban same-sex marriage, visited the archive to develop a new campaign strategy.

“They came here because they [wanted] to look back at the last time LGBTQ people won at the ballot box, and that was in the 70s against Proposition 6, which would have allowed the discrimination against LGBTQ people in public schools,” Oliveira said.

Making historical artifacts like the campaign materials accessible to the public requires a number of structural, behind-the-scenes resources. Oliveira described how reliable storage space, the ability to stay in one area and the financial stability to maintain a collection can all be barriers to preservation.

“Unfortunately, we see a lot of groups that are under-represented because they're either underrepresented in the press, so therefore, their stories don't get told, or when their stories do get told, no one has the incentive to save them because they don't have the economic ability to save materials,” Oliveira said.

Click on the illustration below to see if you're able to identify some of the objects that ONE Archives collects.

Posters

Another institution whose work documents and preserves lesser-known stories is the Center for the Study of Political Graphics. The center collects posters, fliers and other printed materials relating to activism, social change and politics. They currently have over 90,000 items in their collection, which spans a wide range of topics, from the Civil Rights movement to environmental causes.

Click below to hear more from Kahn about the process of finding information on posters being archived.

Websites

In San Francisco's Richmond district, a team is hard at work to preserve the internet. The Internet Archive is a non-profit with the mission of making knowledge more accessible for everyone through preserving web pages, digitizing books and more.

Since January, the Trump administration has taken down an estimated 8,000 web pages from federal websites. Many of the original pages were preserved on the Wayback Machine, a site created by the Internet Archive, as part of their comprehensive review of government pages each presidential term since 2004.

While the team at the Internet Archive works in advance of administration shifts to preserve sites, there are some materials that cannot be preserved through the Wayback Machine. For example, interactive databases and some interactive applications aren’t fully saved when it captures pages, although some have been saved by other organizations.

The threat of pages becoming inaccessible, and the scramble to save the pages before they do, is not a new issue for online communities. From the shutdown of Yahoo! Answers in 2021 to the ability for streaming platforms to take down items users thought they "owned," some feel they are unable to trust that they will continue to be able to view the media they’ve purchased or even created.

Avery Dame-Griff is the founder of the Queer Digital History Project, or QDHP, which documents pre-2010 LGBTQ spaces online. He said that seeing the ways in which sites have been unreliable hosts, losing or even deleting user content, has been a key part of his work.

“When we cede control of digital systems to these larger individuals who do not have our best interests at heart, who do not have any particular ethical position on what it is... we cede our history to them,” Dame-Griff said. “The risk is that they will decide that it no longer matters, they don't want to pay for it, or that you never should have been there in the first place.”

Some of the sites preserved by QDHP are Bulletin Board Systems, a precursor to more modern web platforms that could include news, chat features, direct messaging and even games. Because of how these systems were hosted on individual computers, with a single person sometimes overseeing maintaining them, they could disappear without warning.

Dame-Griff said QDHP combs for evidence of the original content on other sites, such as saved screenshots or references to the content, to preserve some inaccessible pages. In some cases where maintaining user privacy is important, stories from individuals taking part in oral histories Dame-Griff conducts serve as valuable records of what a site was like.

“I keep doing it because I think people... didn't think of what they did in the computer as important,” Dame-Griff said. “[They think,] ‘It was just my computer friends.’ [But] like, our whole world is computer friends now.”

The pain of knowing material was lost because it was not considered important by those responsible for keeping it also extends to unintentional deletion. In his work, Dame-Griff has run into difficulties finding pieces he knows used to exist because family members of deceased individuals threw away hardware, such as floppy disks and hard drives, because they did not consider the historical significance it could have.

“You look at a digital hard drive, and you're like, ‘Is it meaningful? It might have some meaningful stuff,’" Dame-Griff said. “We can understand a discrete object of a stack of letters, a stack of magazines... [but] the digital hard drive is the equivalent of the box of papers someone's grandparent has that has meaningful stuff and [also] tax returns from 30 years ago.”

Click on the illustration below to learn more about Dame-Griff's work on the QDHP

Social Media

Access is a hurdle when it comes to obtaining information from digital storage systems, but for information freely available online, a significant issue is determining what to archive and when.

Josh Arthur, who posts videos online about restoring computers, typically works with technology that is considered vintage. Earlier this year, he decided to preserve TikTok audios after several attempts to ban it in the U.S.

“There's users that are no longer with us, that posted their life history, what they went through,” Arthur said. “If no one saved their stuff, then that's gone.”

Taking on the responsibility of archival or restoration work does not mean having to start alone. Arthur consults online forums and tutorials as he repairs computers, and enjoys seeing when members of his community help each other in the comments of his videos. The real hurdle, he explained, is getting started.

“If you're scared about breaking a computer or messing something up, it's going to happen. You're going to do it. Just do it. If it breaks, it breaks,” Arthur said. “Sit down, do some research... and just go for it... That's how you learn.”

Alexis Durante-Tierney is another creator who’s been encouraging her followers to start preserving things that matter to them. Currently a library technician at the University of Central Florida, Durante-Tierney uses TikTok and YouTube to share ways to archive social media and digital content.

She said it is important for social media to be archived because online platforms remove a barrier of entry for individuals to record how what’s happening around them impacts their lives. Originally from Louisiana, Durante-Tierney has been developing a database on Hurricane Katrina and the effects it had on the local community. Much of what she relies on comes from formal sources, but through her research she sees community record-keeping that she feels is also reflected in current events.

"I couldn't record what was going on during Katrina, but [Palestinians] can record what's going on in Gaza on the ground every single day," Durante-Tierney said. "It almost removes a level of censorship."

Click on the illustration below to learn more about Durante-Tierney's experience preserving online material, including social media content.

Durante-Tierney advised others to start preserving social media or online content as soon as possible. Some of the databases she has used that have been publicly available for decades were recently taken down from government websites.

After these experiences, Durante-Tierney said that if there is content someone cares about online, they should download it. Not only that, but she advised anyone to start saving material from their lives sooner rather than later, since regardless of the medium, when everyday materials are lost, it is often without warning.

“You just have to start doing it,” Durante-Tierney said. “You just have to decide, 'Hey, this is going to be tedious, but I'm going to do it.'"