Quick Reference Guide

Does anyone else do this?

In order to keep my collection organized, I have created what I call a quick reference guide. The guide allows me, with just a glance, to keep track of those stamps I already have and what I still need. It allows me to quickly determine if I need a stamp without going to my actual collection and what the current catalog value is, without actually checking the catalog.

I have used this guide for the first issue revenues for awhile now. I have just created a new one for the provisionals (roughly R152 through R286) with the proprietary battleships included for simplicity. I thought I would share and see if anyone did anything similar. Or something different that does the same thing. I'm always looking for new ideas. So what do you use?



Once I have a stamp, I simply highlight it with a yellow highlighter. If I need a better copy, I'll underline it in red.

Well, you asked

I never went the spreadsheet route, too time consuming.
"A picture saves a 1000 words"

I went the scan route, (decent Epson Scanner say $180, scan 40 stamps, takes about 3-4 minutes?)
Scan the stamp (or, type the info, scan the result as an image)
The trick comes in the naming convention, you attribute the scan
"wanted" "upgrade" "perf var" .... the choice is endless
and you have a scan of the issue forever, for comparison.

Want to find a stamp in your database? mine takes about 3 seconds to find 1 stamp in 250,000

Shopping at the bourse? take you folder of scans along with you on the iphone.

But... in the end, its whatever route you like, that's the best.

A tiny portion of my Turkey collection

I think Rod has already started his own worldwide catalog. He just hasn't published it yet.

Thanks HB.

About 12 years ago, I was trying to get members of a Stamp Newsgroup, to get together, and make a collaborative work that would do similar.

Here's how it would have worked.

Between agreeable members, one would scan mint, or excellent examples of their stamps, at a preferable 600 dpi.
Name the scans by issue date. year/month/day eg: 19340302
Values with leading zeroes eg: 02h (2 heller)
Topic eg Chopin

So any scan would be entitled eg: 19340320 02h chopin (Say Austria)

We could then have a world trade/exchange in Stamp Scans.
Say for Russia with 6000 scans, we could each get a full catalogue of scans within a year or so.

We could see posts like

"Trade : Have 1964-1967 (200) full set of scans for Ghana : trade for 3 years or 100 scans Montenegro"

It sounded so obvious to me, one could get a WW set of scans within 5 years or so of trading.
It never took off

The trade could have expanded to, Cinderellas, revenues, postmarks, etiquettes,
varieties, forgeries, etc & etc.