4 Reasons To Digitize Your Baseball Card Collection

4 Reasons To Digitize Your Baseball Card Collection

Managing your collection can be a tough order to fill, especially if you collect small items like sports cards. Card collectors typically have a lot to sort out, concentrated into storage spaces that are hard to label and index. Luckily, scanners and digital collection tracking techniques have made it easier than ever to keep your entire collection organized. That makes it easier for you to handle trades and pursue completion for teams, series years, or player careers.

Too Many Shoeboxes of Cards

Digitizing your cards will not change the fact that you need to store them somewhere, but it will change how quickly you can find them. When you have multiple boxes of cards across decades of printings, you can fill a lot of storage boxes. For the best protection, it’s a good idea to invest in something a little tougher than a shoebox. For the best organization, a sports card scanner is the key to being able to keep an easily searchable record of your cards. That way when you need one, you can find it quickly.

Keeping Them Safer

If you don’t have to waste time searching in the wrong boxes, then you also don’t have to handle all the cards you would have handled on the way to the one you want. That means digitizing your cards and tracking their locations alongside the other important information about each one will actually keep your cards safer. Less contact time means fewer chances to drop, damage, or otherwise destroy your cards. It’s that simple.

Track Duplicates and Variants

When you use something like a Fujitu FI-8170 to scan your card collection, you get the opportunity to track more than just the info on the card. It’s nice to be able to look up facts and statistics with a simple search, but if you set your records up to support it, you can also track duplicates, player cards across multiple career years or card company releases, and variants like holograms or error printings. That way, you know all the details you need to know to keep pursuing complete sets and rarities.

Make Trading, Selling, and Acquiring Easier

Every collection has a certain amount of churn as duplicates are acquired for investment reasons or accidentally, as part of a larger purchase. When you are putting together your trade lists or streamlining the collection to raise money for an acquisition, it’s a lot easier to know what’s ready to sell and to get it listed when you have complete digital records. A detailed scan of the card shows its condition and provides everything you need to know to put it up for auction, list it for trade on a forum, or even just show it off to other collectors.

For high-volume collectors, the additional streamlining of the auction and trade process weighs heavily in favor of a digital card database. You can get what you need from most device sizes up to an 11×17 scanner, provided the scans are detailed. The rest is finding the right software. Start checking out your options for collection management today.