Sorting By Country

I don't know why you would be "the average American" by putting Spanish coins under Spain. I know Spanish collectors place U.S. coins under Estados Unidos in their collections. I don't feel like it is a matter of honor at all, we just speak different languages and I think it is rather naïve to expect others to use a language they don't know.

If you take your comments to their logical ends then you would be categorizing Japan under Nippon, but why would you write Nippon in English when you should honor the Japanese by writing it #26085;#26412;?

As far categorizations, I order by country name in English, then currency (as a lot of countries have revalued or introduced new currencies), then by denomination, smallest unit to largest unit by date, earliest coins to later coins. If there are a lot of coins that a similar from a year (say like the State Quarters) then I go by KM number.

Some what arbitrary I know, but at least I can find a Spanish coin quickly to see if it is in my collection.

All makes sense. Thanks everybody. It will be a long process. I will let you know if I have any more questions.

This has always been a vexed question for me.
I collect all World coins ancient to modern, all cultures.

For ancient coins, I separate into Greek, Roman, Indian and Chinese, then arrange by date. Same with medieval hammered coins. The 100 or so Chinese cash coins that I have are arranged by dynasty and date from ancient times to until the end of the series, ending about AD1900.

For milled coins, mostly by country then by date, but occasionally only a single country or region may be represented. The single coins for this period are grouped by World regions, because ethnicity or culture within a World region can often be related.

For modern machine struck coins from about 1800 onwards I arrange by country then date.
For large country groupings of the 20th cntury I arrange by denominations, then date. Much the same way as Krause does.


That is my approach and I am still not completely happy with it, but this arrangement is about the best I can think of, and most compliant to the common catalogues.

One major problem for me is that out of my collection of about 1,500 coins, about 100 of them are valuable enough to put in a safe. That can tear the heart out of your collection, and make the logical display of the rest of them more difficult.
The other 1,400 coins constitute a working collection and suffer somewhat from the non appearance of the more valuable ones.

If you put countries by order of their name in their own language you get problems. Russia begins with a letter that looks like a P, but is in fact an R sound. So is it P or R for you?

Greece begins with a letter that doesn't look like a western letter.

China is Zhongguo. Do you put it as C or Z? Or go with the Character for Zhong? You've already put it into pinyin.

My coins (US and foreign) are sorted by date first, then ISO country code, then Krause issuing state, etc. This is done by taking photos, and giving them a file name such as 1765_DE_Saxony_Albertine_1pfennig_DPP_2015_09_12....., and copying links to the photo into one Windows folder. (Sometimes the ISO reporting code is only a guess, since boundaries change over the centuries, and countries disappear, merge, split up, etc.)