Creating Custom Digital Stamp Albums (paper ones too)

May 27, 2014 19:51:31 GMT -5 Perfs14 said:

I am probably going to be burned at the stake for this:

Why catalogue the stamps you have? Isn't their image on your albums enough?

What a great question.  palmas7

Other than just being AR, I actually use my Excel "inventory" for a lot of things.  

• First of all, far less than half of my stamps that I collect are in a digital album.  It will be many years before I remotely am done with all of the albums.  So I keep a list (although it is certainly incomplete) of the stamps I do have.  It helps me to not buy anything that I already have.

• I use the Excel file in many ways.  First of all, it is The One Place, where all of the information regarding my "Dead Country" collection is kept - from what is on DCStamps, what albums I have completed, or even partially competed, my want list, how I subdivide my collection and so forth.  I use it as a backbone for DCStamps and How I categorize my countries.
  
  
• The spreadsheet is an important tool in my Research into Dead Countries.
  
  
• When I am looking at offers at a site like Ebay, and going through some of my "trusted sellers", It is easy to have one open file in front of me which lists the stamps I have/need, rather than open each of my albums when I see a country which I have an album.  It can be quite time consuming. Although if the stamp is potentially "valuable", I will often go the album to verify it is the correct one.

• Each country is part of a larger collection. To be honest, I enjoy understanding my collection as a whole and keeping overall statistics.  For instance, to me it is interesting to know that currently  I have:
  - Out of my current list of 659 "dead countries", I have at least one stamp from 330 (50.1%)
  - 36 of those "dead countries" are complete.
  - I have competed 164 albums
  - In those albums I have 5814 stamps, out of a possible 8570 (68%)

Granted, there is information in my stamp inventory that I don't really need, but I started this long before I ever thought of creating digital albums.  Old habits never die.

I would love others to chime in, on why they catalogue their stamps.

Michael