I could use some tips on how to organize and track my Tino Martinez collection. For a while, I was doing ok. I had a list off all Tino cards ever made that I ripped from some website. It was accurate for the most part, and may have been missing 3-5% of all Tinos, including the newer stuff. From there, I would simply highlight in yellow the ones I had. Problem is, one day I logged onto blogger, and it was no where to be found.
It made me realize how dumb I was to only keep it in one place. For those of you with a player collection of more than 500 cards (I'm probably at about 700 different Tinos), how do you track it? Do you simply go card by card and enter it into a spread sheet or Google doc? Do you have any websites that are helpful? I've heard of Zistle. Anything else that has accurate lists of what cards were made, sortable by player?
I'm going to have to start from scratch, but would love to know some good, fool-proof methods that work for you guys.
I collected baseball cards from the late '80s through 2002. Then I went to college and when I came out, I was lost. There were too many brands, sets, choices, relics, autos, parallels, variations. It was a turn off. However, I slowly made my way back. So here is my attempt to venture back into the hobby. I'll buy a few packs of cards here and there, comment on some cards I have, send out some TTMs, and follow the progress of my Topps Yankees Project.
Personally, I'm a spreadsheet guy. Once I have it in a spreadsheet, it's easier to transfer to other things. Zistle is tricky for player collectors. It works great for the cards that they already have listed, but is a little bit of a pain to add cards to the library. Adding sets to the library isn't bad, but you can only upload to one subset at a time. Player cards across multiple sets can't be bulk uploaded last time I checked.
ReplyDeleteI've done a collection of around 100 on Zistle and it was a medium amount of work. (Including uploading scans)
I am big fan of www.zistle.com, you will probably have to add some cards on your own, but I find it nice to have a want list you can access and change from anywhere.
ReplyDeleteI list five player collections on my blog. I simply add the cards that I do have. This makes the most sense to me, and it's pretty easy to update. I use to back it up on a Word document, but haven't in a while. Guess I probably should. All this Zistle/spreadsheet business is great, I'm sure. But I like to keep it simple.
ReplyDeleteI would do this if I were starting from scratch. I'm about 700 Tino's deep, so the thought of listing out each of those individually scares me.
DeleteGoogle Docs rolling list. Only add to it upon acquiring a card. Have to make sure to check it often or you end up with dupes.
ReplyDeleteI use beckett's website and transfer all the cards within my limits (nothing lower than /50) to a spreadsheet. I actually keep 2 checklist spreadsheets for each player. One has everything (that I checkmark and write where the card is) and the other has the stuff I collect. Then I highlight the cards I have and upload to google docs.
ReplyDeleteEvery once in a while I check and update with new stuff and re-upload to google docs. It can be a little time consuming to set up, but upkeep isn't too bad.
--Jon
I use Zistle to keep track of mine. But like Rosenort said, you'll probably have to list some cards since the site is entirely user dependent. Besides listing the cards, there are also images (again, you'll probably have to upload scans) which I find very helpful.
ReplyDeleteThanks for all the tips. It's looking like Zistle is going to be the way go.
ReplyDeleteIf you need a preview of what it'll look like, here's my small Tino collection which you've contributed to. You can view it either in list view or gallery view. The list view can be sorted by year, card number, set, etc. by clicking the title.
Deletehttp://www.zistle.com/SDre31/collections/tino-martinez
I go with a paper list in the binder with the cards... if anything happens to it, I'm probably starting over from scratch anyway.
ReplyDeleteIf you decide to go with any cloud-based service, make sure you can keep a local copy of your list.