FMF - Friends of Minerals Forum, discussion and message board

[Tracy]

Thanks all for the feedback, it was interesting and insightful. I have faithfully copied all the details about each acquisition into the catalogue I am buidling, but never thought that the actual pieces of paper were worth hanging on to untill recently. As a resullt, a good number of invoices have since gone on to paper reccling plants or deleted files. I guess it's part of being on the learning curve - at first all I did was jot down the specimen's "code name" in s notebook and the price I paid for it. You would think that, given how hard it's been to decipher the scribblings in my notebook and turn them into a coherent cataogue entry, that I would have started hanging onto the invoices themselves, but I figured once entered they were expendable - oh well, I guess it's part of the learning curve.

Several thoughts spring to mind as I think about the replies. First, I have no illusions that my collection will ever amount to anything so spectacular that its dispersion will involve financial transactions significant enough to alert the taxman. I hope to pass my collection along someday to the yourger generation in my family, though so far nobody has expressed much interest. When the time is right (read: when it's fully organized and catalogued) I will have the entire collection appraised, and leave it at that. (as a note: appraisals are important for tax purposes, but also for insurance purposes)

It also never occured to me that anybody would find my paper traili of specimen transactions to be of any interest to persons other than me, though I can see where I might be mistaken. i might actually become 'famous' someday... ;-)

A separate thought that occurs to me is: is it possible that someday it will become the norm to save too much information about a specimen? We only recently were lamenting the fact that many delaers are not in the habit of sharing older labels, much less the provenance of a specimen which they sell. In the future, will/should we be expecting dealers to provide buyers with older labels, sales receipts, and possibly more? Seems to be rather labor-intensive and in some ways detracts from the fun of collecting minerals, which is...well, just the minerals themselves! Eveb now the process of keeping my catalogue current chew up a lot of my time, and I have better success maintaining on some days than on others. I question whether we are already crossing over to the region of "too much info" in our efforts to preserve the provenance of a specimen - maybe Peter had it right when he said that the invoices tell more about the habits of the collector himself/herself, and as such might be most appreciated by those who best knew him/her. To Gneissware;s remarj about how invoices are an important part of charting history whereas keeping a catalogue is an "obligation as stewards of the minerals in our possession" - is not preserving history a part of the obligation, and how can we keep these two purposes (preserving history versus maintaining a catalogue) distinct? I can only find a blurry "dividing line" on this point.

Thanks for giving me stuff to ponder. Any more comments from other readers? I haven't read many "no" responses and don't want my poll to end up skewed,,, ;-)

Happy weekend!

- Tracy

[mraffordable]

Tracy,
As a business person, I have found that it is always a good idea to keep invoices. For business purposes it is obvious for tax write offs but also for insurance purposes. If there is not a lot of information on the seller, I would try and get as much as I could for that "just in case" occasion. If an insurance carrier should want proof of value of your collection, you would have it. As a collector, the entry in your catalogue would probably be sufficient, for most other things. I'm just a cumpulsive saver and usually go back to invoices to find a supplier when I need some more material of the same kind.

[Les Presmyk]

I find that you can never have too much information about a specimen. When I helped Jean Bandy go through boxes of minerals her husband Mark had packed away in the 1950's we came across his labels that showed not just the mine level but the mine coordinates where the specimen was collected. My first reaction was that this was too much information. Then I realized that as the collectors of specimens, the first time you eliminate information from a piece, it becomes lost from that point forward.

When I worked at the Magma mine in Superior, Arizona we had a few opportunities to collect specimens. I placed the panel number, the stope, the elevation and the level on the labels, per the example I had from Mark Bandy. While I took a bit of ribbing from friends, I pointed out to them they could always throw the information away but I had done my duty to provide that information from the outset. While the chances of me ever being able to go back to any of those collecting areas are slim and none, at least the information is preserved.

Invoices, labels (I have known dealers to buy specimens for their label collections and sell the specimen without the old label), internet comments no matter how they are fabricated, are all part of a specimen's provenance and should be preserved.

[Jim Prentiss]

Hello Tracy,

I have kept nearly all the labels I have recieved with my mineral purchasses but I never bothered with invoices. I am not a dealer and tax write ioff is not an issue, so it never occured to me. I do record the initial purchase price in my catalog.

Jim Prentiss

[Gail]

Jim and I have all the invoices of all the minerals we have. We keep a record of check numbers, dates, etc. also.
We then put each invoice in a file for the year it was paid.
I sometimes scan invoices and keep them on my computer, as a reference. Dan Weinrich would send a receipt by email for auction items I had gotten, so I kept them in "my documents" files and backed them up on an external hard drive.
My hope is to scan ALL documents eventually, as a back up and will do yearly to keep in a safe deposit box.