Evernote and Cataloging My Collection

One of my goals this year is to finally complete my collection inventory and catalog of information. Identifying and valuing the models themselves is important (in case I am hit by the proverbial bus) but as a history and provenance nerd there is also so much more information that I care about or could be important to future collectors that you can't tell just but looking at a model. Things like where did it come from, who owned it before, why did I select this one for my collection, does it have a show record, etc.

My collection chaos is more than digital - I need to organize the shelves too

For the record I've been trying to catalog my collection for as long as I've been collecting. When I was a teenager I told my mother a story about how I got one of my models and she said to me "you should really write that down somewhere." Thus began my original catalog which was a binder with a page for each horse where I wrote down important information about them on an index card and attached things l like their NAN cards and ribbons to the page.

My collection outgrew this method pretty quickly and digitizing it seemed like the thing to do anyway. But over the years I have started and stopped many a Excel spreadsheet trying to put together all the info. My ADHD self usually goes from "let me just put down the basics so I have SOMETHING" straight to "I need to capture every data point there ever was" which becomes immediately overwhelming and I give up after recording about 10 models. For awhile I used Picasa albums online to at least have a photograph of every model with some basic information and this was a great guide for me, until that site was taken over by google and eventually archived. It still sort of exists but not in the way I liked it so I gave that up too.

I also still have stacks of paper and print outs in various doom piles around the house just begging to be organized. For years I printed out copies of every eBay auction I won for my records. I also save all the ephemera that comes with models because I know I might need it someday, but it is in no way organized. And I feel like there is this lost era of model horse hobby knowledge from the late nineties to the mid-2010s when digital everything started but it wasn't consolidated or organized. This really stuck out to me when an Early Bird raffle model from one of the first Breyerfests to offer that popped up on eBay in a random collection lot. They used to do three individual test models and that knowledge had been so quickly lost - luckily a few people were still hard copy packrats and someone unearthed a scan of an email that was printed out that showed the models. This was a big gap, but I also realized how much I missed Nancy Young's attention to the tiny details.

For a long time I looked for collection software or wanted to write my own version or website to do it. I have grand ideas for what this would be in my head but the project never got off the ground. Enter Evernote. My father introduced me to Evernote a few years ago because he was using it to catalog EVERYTHING. I immediately loved it and my first thought was YES, finally, a solution to my collection documentation. Let me tell you why I love it so much.

Don't mind the 9+ unread notifications and overdue update - I am that person

Evernote is basically an open framework for storing notes and documents. You can create your own folders and tags - I have done things like receipts, show results, documentation, values, etc. But you don't even need to because Evernote can read it all - whether it's a scan or something you've typed in or an image you've saved. You can type anything in the search bar, let's say part of a model name like "Morganquest" for example, and it will bring up everything you've ever saved with that in it. You can attach it to a scanner which will automatically store the scans in your notebooks so that you don't even have to go through them - the data is just there. This is perfect for me so if I'm in a data mood I can add 87 tags but if I'm not I can scan it and forget it. The information is still stored without me having to wait until I feel like going through it in detail. Finally I can scan in that box of eBay printouts.

It can read my screenshots, and it found the receipt with my MorganQuest Native Sun purchase

And here it found MorganQuest in the 2024 retired list I saved

I scan or screenshot all of my receipts, interesting eBay auctions, interesting Facebook conversations about rare models, the page on the Breyer website or e-mail with information about new releases or special runs, all that sort of thing.

Everything is also "on the cloud" so you can access it anywhere! So many times I've been at a live show and wished I had my Breyer book with me or needed some quick information that I forgot - now I can just pull up my Evernote app and my entire collection and documentation library is right there. This has also been super useful for inputs - for example at Breyerfest. For so many years as I've bought models in room sales I tell myself I'll remember - but BF is such overload that I can barely remember how much I paid for something or where I bought it by the time I get back to my own room. Now I can snap a photo in the room with the price tag, pop it in my Evernote, and it's stored forever! And I can jot down my own notes about why it was interesting to me later.

But about that "forever" - that is the one fear I have with cloud apps. I've been around the internet long enough now to have seen so many amazing sites come and go. Even recently the events surrounding Tik Tok show you how quickly an app can be lost - and all the data that is in there? Terrifying. But on the other hand I've been just as bad at losing my own old records. As much as I try to store them on local hard drives, I have lost so many files over the years from getting new computers to hardware fails that keeping it up on my own is almost just as bad. So as wonderful as digital is, there is something to be said for keeping hard copies - so remind me now and then to print stuff out too.