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Marc Fischer

Public Collectors is founded upon the concern that there are many types of cultural artifacts that public libraries, museums and other institutions and archives either do not collect or do not make freely accessible. Public Collectors asks individuals that have had the luxury to amass, organize, and inventory these materials to help reverse this lack by making their collections public.

Public Collectors features informal agreements where collectors allow the contents of their collection to be published or exhibited, and permit those who are curious to directly experience the objects in person. Collectors can be based in any geographic location.

The purpose of this project is for large collections of materials to become accessible so that knowledge, ideas and expertise can be freely shared and exchanged. Public Collectors is not intended to be used for buying and selling objects.

In addition to hosting collections and other information, www.publiccollectors.org includes many digital collections that are suitable for web presentation, do not have a physical material analog, or are difficult or impossible to experience otherwise. Rare or unique publications, scanned to PDF format and made available for free download, are among the materials included on the website.

Public Collectors organizes exhibitions and events, participates in exhibitions organized by others, creates exhibition opportunities for collectors, teaches, lectures, responds to research inquiries, and makes its own publications.

The administrator of Public Collectors is Marc Fischer.