| Name | Elliott Avedon Collection |
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| Description | Its archive of more than 5000 objects and a large number of documents about games, includes "the world's largest collection of Crokinole boards". Several online exhibits including useful archived papers on line which include some of Stewart Culin's scarce publications.
Formerly at the University of Waterloo, Ontario, the physical collection was transferred to the Canadian Museum of History in 2010. The University of Waterloo continued to maintain an online 'virtual exhibition' of the collection which is called the Elliott Avedon Virtual Museum of Games. In September 2024, this seemed to disappear. When asked, the University pointed to the internet archive: https://web.archive.org/web/20051124215501/http:/www.gamesmuseum.uwaterloo.ca/index.htm |
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| Collection Type | National Museum |
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| Main Website | Elliott Avedon Virtual Museum of Games |
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| Worryingly, the Canadian Museum of History makes no mention of its remarkable collection of games anywhere obvious on its main pages. It has a Children's Museum so the horrific possibility exists that they've miscategorised it under children's toys.
The website of the place positions the link to its collections database incognito at the bottom of the page leading to the suspicion that it is one of those fashionable modern institutions which is actually more of an entertainment centre, than a proper museum.
Once you've found it, the database is searchable. At Nov 2020, a search for Crokinole results in 44 examples. A search for 'bagatelle' produces 143 examples although many of them are miscategorised and are not bagatelle at all.
When asked why there was no page on the Avedon collection, the museum said "You can find the full Avedon Games Collection on our Online Catalogue - searching “Avedon” will pull results for the objects and archival material within this collection." which was an obfuscation. |