This chapter will take you through the options for card storage and how to keep your collection organised.
This may be one of the most important articles in this series - how to keep your collection neat and organized. This will not only help you convince your significant other collecting is a good idea… but will also allow you to have a clear picture of what’s in your collection and where it’s located. This will also help you if you ever want to sell your cards - knowing where cards are located makes the process infinitely more stress-free.
The first part of the process is figuring out what you should use to store your cards. There are a number of different options, but the most important component is that it is divided into sections that will fit sports cards. It’s important that whatever container you use for your sports cards it’s divided into sections - with more sections giving you more visibility over where your cards are stored.
The sections are important as they will be used to reference a card’s location in your spreadsheet - and the more sections there are the more visibility you will have over the cards in the container. For example - if you had two containers of the same size but one had 10 sections and the other had three sections - it would be easier to locate the card in the 10 section box, assuming you knew which section the card is in.
Some options for card storage containers are:
Now that you have your storage container selected - you can create a spreadsheet in either Microsoft Excel or Google Sheets. This is where you will keep track of all the cards in your collection. I would recommend adding the following columns to your spreadsheet at minimum, but feel free to change it to suit your needs:
Once you have a spreadsheet setup you are ready to start logging and storing your cards. Fill in all the details for the card until you get to the location column.
The location column will store a reference to a section of your selected storage container.For example you may choose to assign a letter to each storage container (A-Z) and a number (0-n) to each section in the storage container.
Following this system your first box would be assigned the letter A and your first card’s location will be A1 - with the card being stored in the first section of the box.
So for example, if a card was in the second box in the fourth section - the location reference would be B4 - with B equating to the second box and 4 to the section of the second box. You can come up with any system you want, but make sure it’s consistent and simple enough that it isn’t a chore to maintain.