Joel was lying on the bank wondering how he was ever going to write the ultimate book on Alice collecting, which he had been threatening to do for years, when an unusual squirl ran by. It was a bit geeky in a computerish sort of way, and when he pulled a Blackberry out of his pocket, Joel was totally taken aback. “I have never seen a Squirl such as this in all my life, or even imagined one”, he exclaimed. The squirl then all of a sudden disappeared into his hand-held device. Joel took this as a sign of something most wondrous and jumped in after him. What followed was the answer to a dream.

I have been planning to write a book on collecting Alice for many years. Every so often the urge surfaces and I actually take pen to paper. I organize my thoughts, list the chapter topics, and start to write. Then despair sets in as I remember why I stopped writing the last time. How do I get permission to use all of those photos? I have to have photos of everything. How can I talk about collecting Alice in Wonderland memorabilia and not have photos of everything. I wouldn’t want a book without photos of everything or almost everything, so why would anyone else? The other problem of compiling the list of “everything” seems to pale in comparison. Finding a publisher that would pay to publish a book with all of those photos would have been yet another insurmountable problem, if I allowed myself to think that far ahead.

Almost twenty years ago I started the Alice in Wonderland Collectors Network. I did it primarily to enable myself to find more Alice things. Secondarily, I thought it would provide a forum for collectors to share information. After all it is the collectors who are the experts. The sum total of the knowledge base resides in their heads. In its original incarnation as a primitive paper newsletter sent via the US postal system it was mildly successful, but never quite achieved the purpose I imagined. When I took it to the Internet, I was able to reach more people, but unless they sent e-mail asking questions, I didn’t know who they were. Recently something happened to make my original impetus for forming the network seem terribly insightful. The fortuitous event was receiving the following e-mail message.

Dear Joel,

I learned about the Alice in Wonderland Collectors Network through collectors.org, and I wanted to let you know about a new site for collectors that might be of interest to you and other Alice collectors. The site is called Squirl ( http://squirl.info), and it's a place where collectors can catalog, organize, and share their collections. You can upload pictures and descriptions of your books, art, dolls, figurines, or anything else you might collect, creating a personal online museum.

Squirl is free and really easy to use. My friends and I launched the site in August...so it is fairly new, but growing quickly. There are some really neat collections so far:

Fairy Cards: http://squirl.info/collection/show/342
Hobo Nickels: http://squirl.info/collection/show/314

If you have a chance, I hope you check out Squirl. Also, if you could let the other members of your network know about us (through an online article, perhaps), that would be fantastic. Feel free to email me if you have any questions.

Cheers,

Kristy

Serendipity smiled on me that day. I had no particular interest in placing my collection on-line, since I am not one to search out accolades for the magnificent, multi-faceted collection that I have brought together out of sheer will and determination. It only took me a few minutes to recognize that this was the answer to all of my problems. This was my book. If a picture is worth a thousand words, then thousands of pictures must be worth … well you do the math. Squirl provided me with a tool to accomplish what was previously impossible. All that was required of me was to set things in motion.

The goal is to create the best Alice collectable resource on the Internet, and to this end I have started an Alice in Wonderland Collectors Network group on Squirl containing images of items from my vast collection and images of items I wish were in my collection. The idea is to have collectors open a collection on Squirl and populate it with images of their collectables. The result would be an inventory of all Alice collectables in the world, or as close as we can get to that. At he same time we will create a neighborhood where Alice collectors can share their thoughts – sound familiar.

I am happy to report that the project has begun. A core group of contributors has already been assembled and a structure is in place. I may find that depending on collectors to interact in a defined manner, is akin to a Mad Hatter trying to control the path of a glob of mercury on a moving surface, but being the optimist (I hear that snickering), I am sure it can be done. The twenty year old vision of the Alice in Wonderland Collectors Network can finally be realized, and the beauty of it is that everyone can contribute in their own way.

For some time I have been keeping track of my collection on a database that now contains 1,880 non-book entries. Whenever I purchased or was given a new Alice piece I entered it into the database with the relevant information. Revisiting my data, I missed a few items along the way. Also when I bought a set of Alice items, say twelve Hamilton figurines, I entered it as one item. Now I see that this is not the best way to store this data and I should create a separate entry for each one. The upshot of this is that I will have over 2,000 entries by the time I am done reorganizing.

I have also been collecting a library of images of Alice items that I don’t have. After all, even I don’t have everything (contrary to popular belief). I decided to put images of the items I don’t have in what I have called a virtual collection, partially because people keep complementing me about things that I don’t have. It’s really quite embarrassing. Even if everyone listed their entire collections there would still be things missing, thus the need for a virtual collection to round out the inventory of collectables. I assumed that all of my fellow collectors also had libraries of images just waiting to be uploaded. Unfortunately his seems not to be the case and I am completely baffled by this. Some major collectors don’t have the necessary equipment, digital camera, scanner, and high speed Internet connection, to effectively participate on a large scale. Others must actually have real lives and don’t have the time. As hard as it is to believe, not all people wake up in the morning and think, “What can I do to help Joel with his project today?” The world would go around a lot faster if they did. So what shall I do? Well, I’m not going to give up, not now that I have been given the means to achieve my goal. I’m going to go forward with a “glass half full” philosophy. I hear that actually works for some people. I’m more of a “the glass is half empty and any minute now someone is going to hit me on the head and steal my glass” kind of guy, but that won’t work here.

I am extremely appreciative of those who have joined the cause and hope that as the gallery of Alice images grows, more collectors will be enticed to participate. There may even be collectors that I didn’t know about, who wish to help. Wouldn’t that be grand? How can anyone choose to miss this historic opportunity? Kids, work school – I get it. I have often thought that Carroll book collectors were more aware of each other than Alice memorabilia collectors. Maybe this project will change that.

I have learned that it doesn’t pay to be shy, so when I need help, I intend to take the direct route and ask for it. I will do this by stating a few current needs at a time so as not to overwhelm. I need an image of the Gladys Boalt White Knight ornament. Does anyone know who produced the Alice Holding the Flamingo Teapot (not the Department 56 one, the other one)? I could also use a picture of the twelve Franklin Mint Swarovski crystal paperweights (in their original boxes if possible) and their issue price. Somebody who doesn’t have the time or inclination to photograph their entire collection, may be willing to help with the odd photograph now and again. Every contribution to this project, regardless of size, will make it more useful for all of us.

I’m afraid I have to get into the nuts and bolts of Squirl, so please be patient. Squirl is a beta site, which means it is a work in progress and doesn’t operate as smoothly as a finished commercial site. That said, it does have the basics in place and they have a vision of product evolution. The good news about this is that they are open to suggestions from users on what that vision should include and maybe what features should be priorities. I am most excellent at making suggestions about what other people should do, but before I get into that let me explain the features of Squirl that already exist. You can create a “collection” that contains images of your collection (a touch confusing). When you enter (upload) an image, you can also enter pertinent data associated with that item, title, description, date of creation (of the collectable), and tags. Since you have an image in front of you, the description field should contain information not readily available in the image. It should have size, material, and creator. Tags are like keywords that can be used to make it easier for a user to search the collection for various types of items. When you enter tags for an item Squirl adds a link to that item. When you view a collection, a list of all these links will be presented to you. As tags are essential for making our data more accessible, what should they contain? Category, sub-category, sub-sub-category, creator, manufacturer, material, and character are what I recommend. Rather than try to explain let me just give an example, Figural, kitchen, cookie jar, disney, regal, ceramic, alice. (As an aside, I have decided that all tags should be lower case.) This item will appear on lists of kitchenware, Disney, cookie jars – you get the idea. So if I have a tag, fitz and floyd, you can click on it and it will bring up a list of all Fitz and Floyd items (if they are all tagged correctly). Likewise, you can click on jewelry and see all of those, or mad hatter and see them. These capabilities are all currently available.

There is a fairly new feature called groups. This allows users to create a group of collections with similar types of collectables, such as music, action figures, etc. The purpose of this is to create communities where like-minded people can share their collections and have discussions about them. So our group can discuss Alice stuff without bothering anyone else. This is all well and good, but I have an idea to expand this feature to make it much more useful and possibly attract more users as well. I requested the ability to treat all collections within a group as part of a super-collection. This way when users interact with the group super-collection it appears as a single entity. When they execute a search, Squirl searches through all the collections in the group. When they click on a tag, Squirl forms the list of links based on a pool of tags from all the collections in the group. This is the feature that allows someone to create an inventory of all collectables on a single topic (oh, say Alice in Wonderland for instance). The feature is on the development list and now it remains to be seen where it fits in the schedule.

What is left to do? I have to take about 2,000 photographs of my stuff, finish uploading my library of images for my virtual collection (things I don’t own), and convince others to do the same. That’s only three impossible things before breakfast – piece of cake. Well that’s not quite all. Concurrently, I am creating a database of all these items hyperlinked to the images. This is necessary for a few reasons, not least of which is to account for collectables that nobody has photos of. For my own use, I will be creating a database of my own collection with date purchased, price paid, condition, and other useful information. This must sound more like concurrent life sentences than anything else. “Each to his own,” I always say. Others may paraphrase this as, “Man, you’re crazy” and I can’t really argue with that.

One might ask what the use of this pictorial inventory of Alice collectables is. It allows us to amass our collective knowledge in one place and make it available to all. With any luck, Alice collectors will find this most interesting and will peruse the contents often. They will treat it like any other gallery (the Louvre perhaps), and simply wander through and be amazed by the strange and wonderful things they see. Being good citizens of the Alice collector community, they will no doubt e-mail me when they see errors or omissions, so I can correct the situation. I imagine I will need this help most for items that were made in non-English speaking countries for their local markets. Who knows how many of these exist? I have to believe we will end up with approximately 10,000 entries in the inventory. This is my dream and I can pick whatever number I like. It’s a little like saying that the Alice books are the most quoted books after the Bible and Shakespeare.

Collectors can also use this resource to better identify items in their own collections. Ah, but this is a double-edged sword, because people selling Alice collectables can also get a better idea of what they have. I have learned that people will use this kind of data in unimaginable ways. One likely misconception will be, Joel doesn’t have this, so it must be exceedingly rare and valuable and worth a great deal of money. Often a better interpretation is that this is an item Joel doesn’t want. There are such items… really. Well it is what it is, and will be used as it will. My view is that the Alice world (yes we have our own world) will be a better place with this image gallery.

The Alice inventory will also be useful to non-collectors. Yes Alice, there are people who collect nothing and the best part is, nothing takes up such a little amount of room. I am thinking mostly of those who study popular culture. The sheer size of the inventory ought to cause a re-evaluation of Alice’s place in the popular culture. Students, professors, and even normal people will ask, “Why Alice?” Of course we know, but we will just sit there silently grinning. People can analyze the data by date to see if there are peaks and valleys and try to determine what caused them. Then this could be cross referenced by category of collectible to see the correlations or lack thereof. The possibilities are endless. On the other hand folks might just enjoy looking at the pretty pictures. In any case someday we will look at the result of our labor and see that it is good.

What is the use of a book without text or conversations? After all, I did say that this was to be my book on Alice collecting. I will be writing some short chapters to go along with the image gallery. They will magically appear on the Alice in Wonderland Collectors Network website, http://collectalice.home.comcast.net . What we have here is Chapter 1 of said book. The best thing about this type of book is that it’s free, and will be edited and updated forever.

Visit us on Squirl to see how it’s going and as always

I hardly finished this article/chapter and I see we made the news. Well done.