Since there's been a little discussion on the LaceNews Ebay Alerts recently I thought I'd make a few remarks, because there's a lot more to this than you might realize.
By the way, if you follow LaceNews and only get posts by email, please realize that everything is also on the website http://lacenews.net. Shortly after the auction is over I add the sale price and number of bidders to each Ebay Alert item. And I did correct the typo in date that Jeri mentioned, on the website. The Ebay Alerts have been a part of LaceNews since the beginning in late 2010. Basically if there's no other news, no events, no urgent interviews, I always have this column to fall back on. The format has developed over time, and I'm pretty happy with it right now. Basically I want the reader to pretend you are going to an auction preview, looking at all the laces to be put up for sale. What is going through the collector's mind at this point? What sort of things are you looking for, what specific aspects of a lace do you pay attention to if you are a collector? Condition is obviously critical, so that's become a more concise specific part of the posts over time. Collectors tend to be very leery of talking about these things at large, so I'm taking the complete opposite tack, and talking about the issues as fully as I can. And when I do these posts, I think of the lace and the lacemaker, not the seller. Which gives the posts a certain objectivity and unbiasedness that I value very highly. But there's something more going on here, and that is plain and simple research. I too have many old catalogs, and more are coming online from auctions all the time. Plus private sales. Yes, these could be organized for lace-specific objectives, if you can overcome copyright laws, etc. But I think there's something deeper. If you go look at the lace in any museum, and in many auctions, the collections are generally a result of fairly biased donors and acceptors. The museum that specializes in local products do exist, but are rare. Generally museums aim for the very best quality, and reject a tremendous amount. Or accept it and sell it off quietly later. The same is often true for pieces that come up at the formal auction houses - many are the collections of very discriminating collectors. However, the web has opened up a whole new way of looking at this. The Ebay sellers want to sell lace, regardless of condition or quality. The most beat-up fragment of Duchesse is listed as 'Amazingly outstanding example of handmade Belgian Lace'. Ebay may just be the most unbiased collection of lace that exists today. This is important since if you can actually prove (mathematically) that the database is unbiased, you can assume that it reflects what was actually manufactured in years past. Which could lead to information where original manufacturing records are lacking. We can also compare the results to what you see in museums which can lead to suggestions as to how to improve the collections (although museums don't really like to be criticized). Since I started the alerts I've kept track not only of the ones I've reviewed, but about 4 times as many other pieces that didn't make it to the Alerts. I still keep track of these; a total of over 5,900 pieces so far, with photos, dimensions, form, prices (obviously of interest to appraisers), where they were sold, number of bidders and a few other things. These are all going into a FileMaker Pro database which is a good way to enable analysis of the database. One the Science & Lace discussion group, some are advocating for other relational databases like SQL, which is free, but generally it's a matter of what you are used to. Already I've come up with numbers for what is the most common lace type sold on Ebay (Maltese), followed by Duchesse de Bruxelles, Point de Gaze, Application on Machine net . I have these divided into about 100 different lace types. Comparisons with what few manufacturing and export records exist can give an indication if this is a truly unbiased collection, capable of giving information where records are lacking. Museum collections and more formal auctions data could certainly be added to the database to facilitate comparisons, but this is in the future. This isn't the only effort going on along these lines. In England a PhD thesis is in the works on a this subject. And the Lace for Study blog http://www.laceforstudy.org.uk/about/ has also established an extremely useful database. I mentioned that I have currently 100 categories of lace, however this badly needs to be systematized, especially as this data uncovers variations in various categories. And that information is already coming through loud and clear. A good database is priceless and is where everything starts. _________________________________________________________________ Laurie Waters [email protected], [email protected] <http://lacenews.net/> http://lacenews.net - To unsubscribe send email to [email protected] containing the line: unsubscribe lace [email protected]. For help, write to [email protected]. Photo site: http://www.flickr.com/photos/lacemaker/sets/
