How Do You Keep Track Of Your Ancients?

I have a number added to the Works database solely for the purpose of sorting the coins in the order I want. First I have a field dividing coins into groups as I wish. I use RE, RS and RX for Romans before the Severans, The Severans (my specialty) and after the Severans. That is followed by a four digit numeric field with each number selected to place the coin in the order I want it to fall in relation to the others in its group. I follow that with a four digit sequence number (0001 is the first coin I bought, 9999 will be the last if I live that long (unlikely).




Above is my coin photo gi 0230 bb 0323. The GI field tells me the coin is a Greek Imperial. 0230 is a meaningless number in the range 0000 to 9999 about where I felt a Hadrian should fall within the Greek Imperial series. A Diocletian might be in the 9000's while Augustus under 0050 or so. The BB is a sign that this photo has a black background. Some of my coins have GG or WW photos as well with other color backgrounds. 0323 means it was the 323rd coin I ever bought. I can sort my files by any combination of the fields. If I want to see files on coins I bought in a certain time period I can sort on sequence number but if I want coins ordered by their date, I sort using that first number .

All this may seem overkill when you have 20 coins but it starts being more helpful when you hit 2000. Just be sure to spread your date numbers out so you won't run out of spaces where you get new coins. That is why I have a separate series for Severan coins. I own more Septimius Severus coins than I do coins before him or after. If you specialize in Constantinian, you might want a separate series for what fits in each RIC volume, for example. I wish I had done that but after entering numbers for decades, changing the system is a lot of work so you need to decide what you will want when you are old and set it up now.

That's a very good post that I can appreciate because I need to start figuring out a way to catalog my own coins. I've been thinking about it recently and I have been thinking about programming one myself in Visual Studio C++. Or just using an Excel sheet.

I'm not sure which direction I'm going to go yet. That's my thoughts on it.

I use Excel. My son who was a reports officer with the US Army, made up a spreadsheet at my request. I had trouble with it at first as I have never really used nor poplulated Excel. But with a little help from my son and a lot of patience he was able to help me through it. My catalog numbering system is simplicity itself (at least for me). It's a numbering system consisting of the location of the coin, i.e., 2-5-3-4 (book, page, line, cell). I am able to sort through the spreadsheet in almost limitless variations, and each catalog entry has a miniature image of the coin itself (for insurance purposes). So far it has worked for me. I would be more than happy to share this spreadsheet, but I do believe you must have some working knowledge of Excel. I would be lost without my son's explanations.

My ancients collection is not big enough. Only about 200 or so over 1,000 years old, mainly Greek Roman and some Indian and Chinese, that are part of a much larger collection. They are grouped in albums by culture, then age. To slightly complicate matters, the more valuble items are in a safe.

I started out with the usual "Word" document and while it's still useful I wanted something more interactive. I dabbled in setting up an Access database which could do alot of database stuff but it was still not flexible enough to do what I really wanted.

So ....

I learned about 20 html commands (that's all that's really needed) and set up my own website that provided an interactive tour of my collection - and others could benefit from it as well as I expanded my collection (slightly!) to include all know examples with all the appropriate references.

http://www.diadumenian.com/

I actually went one more and wrote the book - so the references in it should be about as comprenhensive as it is possible to get.


However.

I realise that this was (sort of!) easy for me as my collection is so specialised and focused on a very narrow field.

but I think the principle is the same for anyone. A few html commands under your belt and it's really easy to build a very satisfying tour of your collection.

Just my thoughts

Malcolm

I also use Excel spreadsheets, I used them a lot at work so I'm pretty comfortable with them and use VLOOKUP to populate labels for printing. I also find the filters useful when I just want to look at certain coins.

They can get time-consuming but they are what suits my needs best.

In a way, I use a photo-based record for my coins. My Flickr account has photos of my better coins, as well as any research I have done on each. It's easy to do searches based on keywords that brings up thumbnails of all relevant coins.