i gave a talk at an archiving symposium about the post-blogosphere which i didn’t coin, link rot, and hypertext as a way to have a conversation with citation and acknowledgement embedded into it. it was a paper presentation actually and everyone really liked it, they set me up to speak after the coin curator at the barber institute of fine arts like our presentations would each offer both sides of the coin in the debate of ‘to preserve or not to preserve’ and i didn’t want it to be like that but it sure ended up like it. she asked, after my talk, what about coins, and you bet i said let visitors touch them imagine being a kid on a school trip and getting to flip an ancient coin. besides they’re possibly the least fragile artefact a museum can house so surely it would be fine and you have metal detectors if you’re really concerned about people swiping them but i’m not sure you could really make good coin with stolen artefacts if you don’t know about black market buyers so the likelihood of thievery was low right, right. she wasn’t so sure. i felt a bit mean for getting her like that but then again in her presentation she said there’s a coin she curates (?) that may or may not have the image of the prophet muhammad PBUH on it and she opted to show it to a group of kids (including muslim kids) despite this obviously being completely inappropriate! i couldn’t write the paper because you kind of need to be in funded academia to write a 80k word paper and i soon realised i was the only presenter who was not, but the paper would have been good i bet soo good.
