Papers of the Bibliographical Society of Canada 62 (2025) REVIEWS  Jason Camlot, Martha Langford, Linda M. Morra, eds., Collection Thinking: Within and Without Libraries, Archives and Museums, New York: Routledge, 2023, 342 p., $81.50 (paperback) ISBN 9781032252551 Review by JESSE CARSON University of Alberta  As its title implies, Collection Thinking: Within and Without Libraries, Archives and Museums explores conceptions of   collection   (as both noun and verb) that draw on and move beyond frameworks of understanding established in the institutionalized disciplines of library, archival, and museum studies. Editors Jason Camlot, Martha Langford, and Linda M. Morra bring together librarians, historians, artists, and academics from fields including media studies, queer studies, feminist education, children  s literature, and Indigenous studies to present case studies of collectors, collections, and collecting communities. Through these studies and the editors   contributions, the reader is presented with a multitude of methods for conceiving (and reconceiving) collections and collectors. The work is divided into three parts:   Ontology,     Agency,   and   Community,   which represent a distillation of a broader set of categories explored by the volume  s editors and contributors through an international scholarly symposium and subsequent conversations (1). Each section begins with a conceptual introduction by one of the editors explaining the term and how it informs collection thinking, then presents five case studies and closes with   a formally experimental   snapshot   chapter composed by a practitioner (a curator, a professional record collector, an artist) to explore collecting from the grounded perspective of doing and making   (15).  Review: Collection Thinking: Within and Without Libraries, Archives and Museums - 2 https://doi.org/10.33137/pbsc.v62i1.44559  Part one,   Ontology,   demonstrates how collections arise and are defined and redefined by individual agents and community networks. Emphasis is placed on the physical and intellectual formation of collections, as well as social, personal, cultural, and affective reasons for collecting. It is here that the assumptions of collecting institutions are most strongly interrogated. In   Incautious Stewardship of Library Collections,   metadata librarian Joshua Hutchinson traces the paths of four personal libraries donated to institutions and integrated into their larger collections. Hutchinson demonstrates how a personal library as a collection can be lost when cataloguing practices dismantle it into discrete, individualized items. He contrasts this by presenting archival methods that deal with objects as groups and place greater emphasis on provenance (an approach better suited to maintaining collections and their contexts). The limitations of cataloguing and creative efforts to capture collections are also explored by librarians Nathalie Cooke, Anna Dysert, and Merika Ramundo, who recount their efforts to catalogue and make accessible a manuscript collection featuring enigmatic books of fare    a unique subgenre of riddle book that blends riddles and recipes.   Ontology   then moves beyond the institutional lens by presenting a series of case studies that consider the collection as an index of the collector  s identity and as a theme represented in children  s literature. The section closes with a Q&amp;A between Camlot and Johan Kugelberg, a curator, music historian, and   archival activist   who gathers collections and donates or sells them to archives and museums. Collectively, these chapters demonstrate varied viewpoints on collecting, contrasting institutional perspectives and their accompanying methods with outlooks that are much more deeply personal and idiosyncratic. Part two,   Agency,   explores how people shape collections. Art historian Georgia Phillips-Amos presents an intriguing case study of The Fabiola Project, a collection of over 450 reproductions of an 1885 painting of Saint Fabiola curated by Belgian artist Francis Alÿs. Phillips-Amos traces the development of the collection, from Alÿs   first purchases of copies he came across in a Brussels flea market in 1992 to the gradual  Papers of the Bibliographical Society of Canada 62 (2025)  Review: Collection Thinking: Within and Without Libraries, Archives and Museums - 3 https://doi.org/10.33137/pbsc.v62i1.44559  development of the collection into what is now a living body of hundreds of reproductions. Valérie Bouchard  s   Collection as Biography   and Emily R. Aguiló-Pérez  s   Creating, Collecting, and Curating   center collectors through interviews with Annie Cantin, a wealthy collector, and two Puerto Rican women who collected Barbie dolls, respectively. Their chapters highlight the importance of relationships in collecting; Bouchard  s study focuses on Annie Cantin  s network of merchants and fellow collectors, and Aguiló-Pérez  s study explores how the two Puerto Rican women shared collecting practices with their daughters. Katherine McLeod shifts focus to the agency of audiences in her study of a collection of recordings of a Canadian radio program. Drawing from performance studies theorist Rebecca Schneider  s work, McLeod centers listening as crucial to the enactment of the performances recorded in the collection; through this exploration, she demonstrates the importance of playing and hearing such collections, as well as attending to silences left by literary voices that were not included. Closing with a chapter by Patrick Feaster, a collector of old sound recordings who drew from online communities to build his collection,   Agency   offers a diverse exploration of intention, emotion, and relation as they pertain to collections and collecting. Part three,   Community,   focuses on communities that form around or are implicated in collections. The case study subjects include a collection of embroidery, collecting communities formed around a mobile game, Montreal-based documentation centre Artexte, a 1970s feminist women  s journal, and the recovery of texts by Indigenous authors in Canada. In their chapter on Artexte, Hélène Brousseau and Jessica Hébert return the conversation to institutional and disciplinary methods, detailing how they blended traditional methodologies of archival science with a proactive, community-centred approach to circulation to ensure that collections are activated rather than ossified. Their chapter, in particular, speaks to a central concern in archival and museological literature: ensuring that collecting practices do not continue to silence or obscure some voices in favour of others. Deanna Reder and Margery Fee  s chapter  Papers of the Bibliographical Society of Canada 62 (2025)  Review: Collection Thinking: Within and Without Libraries, Archives and Museums - 4 https://doi.org/10.33137/pbsc.v62i1.44559  on Indigenous authors demonstrates how this type of exclusion continues to occur and presents the important example of The People and the Text, a collecting project that is both an act of resistance and an act of inclusion. The broad scope of Collection Thinking effectively serves its goal of exploring collections and collecting from within and without libraries, archives, and museums. Readers may find the work to be wandering at times. While the three overarching themes provide some structure, many chapters feel as though they could fit into any section, and the book itself does little to formalize or categorize the concepts discussed. For example, while Hutchinson  s chapter on library cataloguing appears in   Ontology,   it could also find a home in   Agency,   as cataloguing is very much a human act. However, the porosity of the sections does not detract from the goal of exploring the nature of collections (and can likely be attributed to the fact that the book is a distillation of a much larger and wide-ranging conversation that began at a conference). The editors themselves describe the volume as a collection of   messy cases,   and their short conclusion aims to raise questions and foster discussion rather than provide answers (324). This book may have particular appeal to those working in collecting institutions with a background in information studies. With multiple case studies written by practitioners, users of, and collaborators with libraries, archives, and museums, it raises important questions about the lives of collections before they come to institutions    and their lives after they cross the threshold. The cases present a theme of keeping collections alive through use and thoughtful management, in resistance to more traditional approaches that can result in what Brousseau and Hébert call   ossification   (266) and Wagner calls   sedimentation   (231). Collection Thinking speaks to current conversations in the information studies disciplines. It touches on calls for reconsidering how collections are acquired and managed, as well as the relationships between institutions and the communities and collectors implicated in those collections. Discussions on how disciplinary conceptions of collections and collection-making can be limiting will ring true and timely to those who  Papers of the Bibliographical Society of Canada 62 (2025)  Review: Collection Thinking: Within and Without Libraries, Archives and Museums - 5 https://doi.org/10.33137/pbsc.v62i1.44559  engage critically with appraisal and collection development. After all, recognizing that collections and collectors exist outside of institutional contexts serves to enrich and expand how we engage in collection thinking within and beyond the walls of libraries, archives, and museums. Copyright © 2025 Jesse Carson. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.  Papers of the Bibliographical Society of Canada 62 (2025)