Quote:1) Who determines which VAMs go onto the Top, Hot, Hit, Elite, etc. lists?
2) What criterium are used to place a
VAM on a list?
3) Do the lists churn- that is, could a
VAM be removed from a list if it falls out of favor and a different
VAM get added to a list?
These lists are arbitrarily created by the authors. In every case, the authors are people whose stature in the VAMming community is unquestionable; their words carry weight and their choices don't get much argument in the community. Generally, once published the lists don't change.
What
does change is the level of knowledge regarding rarity, which is in many cases an essential component of worthiness to be on a list. Some varieties are so striking as to belong on "popularity" lists regardless of rarity - the 1888-O "Hot Lips" comes to mind. This one is common-enough that at least one person has put together an almost-complete grading set of it, but it's such a fantastic "gateway" coin to VAMming that it belongs on everybody's must-have list.
What many newcomers don't quite grasp about VAMming is that the whole process is barely out of its' infancy. Even though variety identification has been actively pursued for almost half a century, one must factor in the huge quantity of extant coins and known varieties. Something close to 5,000 individual varieties are known and more are designated every day. Nothing like it has ever been attempted in numismatics, not on this scale.
The workload of collating all this information is incomprehensible. No, there is not a specific database, not in any electronic sense. VAMworld is as close as it gets. Many people are putting close to full-time hours in at VAMworld, uncompensated, and they're still barely able to do more than cope with the incoming flow of new information, much less better-collate the existing database.
As a wild guess, I'd throw out a number of 50% to describe how much of the actual available facts have been collected. And going forward, each additional fact is going to have a bearing on previously-known "fact" - varieties will be discovered to need consolidation, rarity scales will need to be revised (in both directions). VAMming is a living, growing thing. It's unlikely that the effort will be completed in your lifetime or mine,
if at all. We still can't say with certainty that every known variety will be identified, and the more I learn the less I believe that each individual die pair will ever be described.
Posted 01/04/2012 8:03 pm
