A few weeks ago I went on a road trip to Canberra and Melbourne to visit both the National Archives and also the National Library, with the goal to sit down and study the John Ryan collection in Canberra, a number of comic books and correspondence in the Archives and the Jack Elliott collection at Monash University.  Thanks to the kindness of then people working in those institutions I was able to gain a lot more information than I previously had – the Ryan collection is stunning in scope and diversity alone.  Seeing the collections and the contents of the archives got me to thinking about how precious some collectors and archivists get over what they possess and how difficult, if not impossible, it is to gain any form of meaningful information from those collections held in private hands.  Yet those who have the information and refuse to share it are quick to leap on the mistakes of others.  To that end I’ve decided to throw my own collection open for research purposes, but it’ll be…