A museum is distinguished by a collection of often unique objects that forms the core of its activities for [education], [[research, etc. This differentiates it from an archive or library, where the contents may be more paper-based, replaceable and less exhibition oriented, or a private collection of art formed by an individual, family or institution that may grant no public access.

(garbage collectors)

<programming> (GC) The process by which dynamically allocated storage is reclaimed during the execution of a program. The term usually refers to automatic periodic storage reclamation by the garbage collector (part of the run-time system), as opposed to explicit code to free specific blocks of memory. Automatic garbage collection is usually triggered during memory allocation when the amount free memory falls below some threshold or after a certain number of allocations. Normal execution is suspended and the garbage collector is run. There are many variations on this basic scheme. Languages like Lisp represent expressions as graphs built from cells which contain pointers and data. These languages use automatic dynamic storage allocation to build expressions. During the evaluation of an expression it is necessary to reclaim space which is used by subexpressions but which is no longer pointed to by anything. This reclaimed memory is returned to the free memory pool for subsequent reallocation. Without garbage collection the program's memory requirements would increase monotonically throughout execution, possibly exceeding system limits on virtual memory size. The three main methods are mark-sweep garbage collection, reference counting and copying garbage collection. See also the AI koan about garbage collection. (1997-08-25)

Waste collection is a part of the process of waste management. It is the transfer of solid waste from the point of use and disposal to the point of treatment or landfill.

The Royal Collection of the British royal family is the largest private art collection in the world.Hall, p.

A scientific collection is a collection of items that are preserved, catalogued, and managed for the purpose of scientific study.

A foreign key is a set of attributes in a table that refers to the primary key of another table. The foreign key links these two tables.

A foreign body (FB) is any object originating outside the body of an organism. In machinery, it can mean any unwanted intruding object.

<database> A column in a database table containing values that are also found in some primary key column (of a different table). By extension, any reference to entities of a different type. Some RDBMSs allow a column to be explicitly labelled as a foreign key and only allow values to be inserted if they already exist in the relevant primary key column. [Is it still a foreign key if the primary key is in a different column in the __same__ table?] (2005-01-14)