Collections

Collections are complete rosters of classes of Nizhny Novgorod objects assembled by the encyclopedia: hydrofoils and ekranoplans, GAZ car models, defunct sites of the Nizhny Novgorod internet, deputies of the City Duma and the Legislative Assembly, renamed geographical features, buildings and structures from the Strelka to the fair.

A collection differs from a rubric in that it aims at an exhaustive roster. A rubric gathers what has been written; a collection lists everything belonging to the class — both the objects that already have an article and those that do not yet. That is why every collection shows how many objects are described out of how many: "48 of 48" means the class is closed completely, "13 of 630" that the work has only begun. Gaps in a roster are not hidden: a blank in the list is an invitation to fill it.

Nizhny Novgorod produced things in classes, and that is the point of the genre. There were twenty-six hydrofoil and ekranoplan designs, forty-eight models of the Gorky Automobile Plant, and more than fifteen hundred Nizhny Novgorod websites that closed over a quarter of a century. Such series are interesting as a whole: someone looking for a single Raketa usually wants to see the Meteor and the Voskhod too, and what set them apart.

A collection is also a grid on which history accumulates. An article about an object is not finished once written: when a new publication about it appears, a chronicle line is added to the article — a date, a fact and a link to the source. Within a year an object acquires a connected history that exists neither in reference books nor in the archives of individual publications.

Every collection has a guide article with its roster by era or section and a rubric of its own holding the articles about the objects. Below are all the collections of the encyclopedia, newest first.