kinda sorta O/T: Wish list format for price guide

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Posted By: warshawlaw

If you could design your own price guide/catalog/encyclopedia of baseball cards how would it best work for you in terms of layout?

I was thinking that I'd like to see lots of illustrations and detailed write-ups in one section, checklists in a second section, and prices either with the checklists or in a third section. Sort of a one-stop combo of the Lipset book and the SCD book. You could xerox the checklists and/or prices for shows while leaving the prose and photos at home.

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Posted By: BlackSoxFan

Digital and fully searchable by player/set/etc...etc... now beckett's tool is the best thing i have found for finding which cards a player appears on...but it is far from ideal.

Regards,

Black Sox Fan

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Posted By: John Effenheim

I know it would never happen, but I'd love to see the team a player is pictured with listed along with his name.
Also, I know the topic of the SCD online or DVD has been mentioned before, but how about meeting us half way. For example, how about a site where I could type in the players name and date range and the query would tell me where to look in the book for possible matches.

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Posted By: Richard

For a long time I have thought that a digital checklist / price guide would be extremely useful. One complaint I (and others, I'm sure) have about price guides is that they have to be prepared so long before they go to print that the pricing in many cases becomes almost useless.

What I think would be interesting (and useful) would be a checklist program through which you could track your collection. In doing so, you could track the price and purchase format (ie. private, auction, etc), which could be consolidated anonomously at some central location creating a real-time price guide (which other users of the system could then use for research). Obviously the more detail you include the less anonymous it becomes, but adding geographic purchase locations and timeframes, would really allow you to get any idea of the real price of cards. It would also allow those who wanted to to see trends in pricing, etc...

Richard.

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Posted By: Cobby33

Beckett.com actually has a fairly good database in which to track your collection based upon player and condition. Unfortunately, there is not a field for the back of the card. Also, the conditions they offer aren't as specific as they could be and the prices are low.

OK--so maybe it isn't that great, but it does have pictures!

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Posted By: warshawlaw

A searchable database is a copyable database. You get nothing for your troubles in preparing the database because once you post it, the work can be pirated, especially since checklists per se cannot be copyrighted. For that reason I don't think you will ever see a comprehensive publication like the standard catalog on anything except paper. A subscription service for price compilations is potentially a better possibility, but again, probably not worth the work unless some heavy engineering goes into protecting the data from capture. Which, of course, undermines the basis for the service in the first place. The most you will see is probably a service that lets you direct print a copy of some data for a fee. Many industry organizations in the construction field already do this with their standard forms (American Institute of Architects, etc.).

Setting aside the issue of electronic data and limiting things to a hard copy, what format would you like to see?

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Posted By: identify7

Jay B.: don't you use something like this to check your players cards?

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But what I would value most for the checklist portion of the database is to organize it by year of issuance. This would simplify the association of players with teams, the correlation of players with events, and identifying of a players initial and subsequent cards.

For example: what are the possible choices in selecting 5 cards which can represent each of the five years in which Hornsby averaged .400+?

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But then again, the year of a card's issuance is only one indication of the date associated with the player represented. We know that cards often portray players with images which have been generated years prior to the issuance of a card set. Except for isolated research, data defining image origin with set ID is probably decades away, if it is ever undertaken.

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Posted By: BlackSoxFan

Adam -
Everything can be copied.... anything and everything...so i don't think that argument holds water..... not to mention anyone who built such a product would probably run it off of a server and not make it accessible for dl....



Regards,

Black Sox Fan

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Posted By: Richard

Further to Ted's argument, if you really wanted to protect the data and checklists, you could create your own program/front-end (as opposed to using Internet Explorer and the like), and then only allow access to the aforementioned server with a key of some kind. You would need to take this development a few steps further to prevent people from sharing the front-end tool, but it would at least prevent people from seeing how the data is stored, and from distributing the checklists/data in their own format.

Richard.

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Posted By: BlackSoxFan

Richard - email me...

Regards,

Black Sox Fan

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Posted By: Todd Schultz

but I used to subscribe to Beckett's online, because I wanted a searchable database for post-war cards. I don't recall what their checklists were like for pre-war, but I had already entered something like 13,000 pre-war cards by hand into my own spreadsheet/database, so it wasn't much of a concern. Anyway, their checklists were/are? great for downloading as text and pasting into spreadsheets, so it can be and has been done for some time. Adam is right, the checklists themselves are not copyright protected. The pricing information, format and display are protectible.

I too would like to see team affiliations placed with the cards on each checklist. I would also like a better set and card description--color photos would be nice for each set's exemplar. Two columns for prices would suffice for me, especially in pre-war where listing nm prices is a joke, owing to the infrequency of finding such cards. All known variations should be catalogued, and of course, all post-1981 stuff should have its own book. Finally, a separate price notation and pictures of companion pieces would be great, maybe alongside each set--showing what a pack or wrapper looks like, or a box or display piece.

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Posted By: Richard Dwyer

A good program from the past was called "Card Collector" from Ablesoft. Updates were added by adjusting a percentage of what the cards increased by. Updates were easy. Far as I know they quit doing the software. (?) I quit using after they dropped Mac.