Probably an odd mix with the other topics on my website, but something I have been doing since I was a small boy. Latterly I have been buying stamp album lots from local auctions. Harvesting the stamps from them and then incorporating them into my collection.
There appear to be two types of stamp collector: the small volume but high value collector who is always looking for the missing stamp to make the full set, or the find the stamp that could make some serious money Then there is the leisure collector like me, with thousands of low value stamps. I simply enjoy the identification and catalogue process. It feeds some inner need for order and symmetry that I find relaxing and satisfying. When its raining, the golf course is closed and the garage is too cold, you’ll find me with my stamps.
My collection is quite extensive now with almost 60,000 stamps catalogued in stock books and probably an equivalent number waiting to go through the identification and cataloguing process. Being a bit of an IT geek, I developed a method of keeping track of my collection – down to single stamp level i.e. it’s country of origin, date of publication, face value, Stanley Gibbons reference number, stock book number, page and row. As the size of the collection has grown so has the sophistication of the solution. It now comprises of an excel spreadsheet per stock book, an access database containing all of the stock book data and a Power BI visualiser to help sort and search.
Below is a web portal into this Power BI Report that I created. Feel free to have a poke around.
Please note: The Stanley Gibbons valuations for each stamp, bear little resemblance to the actual prices these stamps sell for. The actual prices are far far lower in todays market.
The Power BI report has 5 tabs:
- Overview – An overview of the collection as it currently stands. The overview can be filtered by Country, Year or Stock Book
- TOC – A more detailed view of the contents of each Stock Book, showing a page summary, overview by country and a stamp listing by value.
- World Map – Illustrates the distribution of the collection across the globe. The size of the ballon over each country illustrates the amount of stamps held in the collection for that country.
- Search – As it’s name suggests, this visual allows you to search the collection by country, date, Stock Book or Stanley Gibbons reference number.
- Country Mapping – Maps the countries named on the stamps with their modern names so they can be displayed in the World Map.