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Collecting for knowledge - with us you won't overlook
any important collecting fact or date.
I cordially welcome you to our Collectors' portal. My basic goal is to help the widest possible number of collectors, the advanced ones as well as beginners only just embarking on this fascinating and most educational adventure.
My portal is based on five fundamental principles:
- Collecting for knowledge - I primarily regard collecting things as a road to broaden knowledge. It makes sense only when it is not restricted to the sole fact of possession, but marks a step towards enhancing one's own knowledge in a given field and sharing it with others. It is such an image of collecting that we should jointly build within society. This vast treasury of collecting knowledge has yet to be adequately reflected by scholarship and publications.
- Dates and facts - I wish to guarantee a sense of security to everyone who regularly visits my site that amid the press of daily affairs he/she will not overlook any Date or Fact of importance to a collector.
- Bridge - This portal is to be a link on several different levels. It will provide liaison amongst collectors, and that end should be served by the information about individual collections, and it should also be a bridge between collectors and the outside world. I also wish to be a bridge between Poland's community of collectors and their counterparts abroad. I shall be expanding the English version of my site, in order to open our collectors' community to the world.
- Region - Collecting is closely linked to "regionalism" and the concept of Little Homelands. It helps gather facts from a given region's history and properly associate events. As regards my site, it largely concerns the Sącz (Sadecczyzna) and Spisz (Zips) regions, but gradually, with your help, I shall branch out into other areas as well.
- Partnership - I regard each of my guests as a partner and invite him or her to work together.
I propose a moment of reflection about collecting.
The Dictionary of the Polish Language defines it as gathering objects of a single type according to specific criteria and equates it with gathering. The Polish Scientific Publishers' Universal Encyclopaedia also associates collecting with gathering and defines it as assembling works of art and historical mementoes according to set criteria. The American Heritage Dictionary maintains that collecting means creating collections.
I believe one can do justice to collecting only if one regards it as one of history's auxiliary disciplines whose purpose it is:
- to gather collections, or collecting in the traditional understanding of the term, and
- to prepare and present its results, in other words Collecting for Knowledge.
Collecting is keeping pace with scientific disciplines in making use of Information Technology, including the Internet. A vast number of collectors' Web sites on the net confirms that view. We should all join forces to build a 'collectors' map in the Internet'.
sincerely yours
Ryszard Kruk
Warsaw, Poland
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