How to collect and classify coins?
There is no single rule that every collector has to follow when sorting his coins. Everyone will have their own preferences when it comes to organising their collection and adding to it with new coins. The organisation of your collection will be very important in order to have a direction and to know what you like for example to exchange or buy next coins.
The following are the most common ways to organise coin collections:
- Collect Coins by Country
- Collect coins by Type
- Coin Collecting by Theme
- Collect coins by design
- Collecting coins by historical period
- How to archive and classify coins?
- Collection management tool
Collect Coins by Country
These are collections that include only specific countries, collectors who collect coins by country usually have a sub-organisation (one or as many as you like), for example by historical period and type of coin. Normally the collector's own nationality is what determines the country of the coins he collects, although there are countries with a large number of collectors, such as the United States or Spain.
Collect coins by Type
One of the most common ways of organising a collection is by type, i.e. by design and characteristics of the coins. The most commonly used numismatic catalogs, such as Krause's World Coins, have this organisation and assign a KM to each type of coin.
Collect coins by Type and Date
The KM of a coin is the number assigned by the World Coins catalog of the Krause Publishing House to each type of coin of a country. Each country starts with KM 1 and the following coins are numbered consecutively.
What is the KM of a coin?
This way of organising the collection is the same as by type, but each type usually has several years of minting during the time that the design of that coin was in force. This organisation consists of having all the coins of the type together, differentiated by year.
Coin Collecting by Theme
There are collectors whose organisation is based on the theme of the coin image. For example, many collections are related to fauna or flora and these collectors group together coins of animals, flowers and plants.
Collect coins by design
Coins can have many characteristics that can make them collectible:
- Bimetallic: they have several metals inserted into each other, e.g. 1 Euro coins.
- Holes: there are a lot of coins that have central perforations making them very attractive.
- Coloured: coins that are enamelled or coloured.
Collecting coins by historical period
Historical eras can be an interesting option to start collecting, for example the Peseta has many collectors, but the same happens with coins from empires or colonial eras.
How to archive and classify coins?
The preservation of coins is one of the priorities that all collectors should have. The health of your coins once archived must be guaranteed for a long time, for this there are a multitude of options such as capsules, plastic sleeves, cartons and albums.
Cardboard is one of the most commonly used forms, for which we propose a marking that, although it is not a standard, many numismatists use:
Collection management tool
Foronum provides numismatists with a powerful tool to manage their collections. With the base of its catalog of world coins you will have at your disposal thousands of coins to add to your collection. This collection will be stored in our database in a secure way and you will be able to export it whenever you want to file formats such as pdf and excel. Your collection is accessible anywhere in the world 24 hours a day. More information on how to manage your coin collection
