Important Note: I
treat stamps as art. Therefore I have chosen
slow pages over bad scans. Already,
some of the pages are as large as 250k. Most of the set pages
are fairly small. It is the block and sheet pages that are large.
None of them are slow with a cable modem or faster connection.
Sooner or later everyone will have faster connections and I did not
want to finish this project just in time to go back and improve the
scans. This site is optimized for a monitor set to 1024-768 resolution
at 16M colors
I intend to start by posting
images of all the stamps in my collection and then augment the images
with scans from other sources. To date I have posted all of
the stamps from the countries Afars to Gibraltar . There are already
over 3900 stamp scans on the site. On the list page for each country
I will put a link to the country's philatelic website whenever possible.
Any attempt to create an order/family/genus list is a long way off.
It now appears that it will be 25,000 stamps and about 1.5 to 3gigs
of images.
In addition to the reference
collection I intend to create virtual stamp exhibits made of sub-sets
of the collection. I have started to develop malaria, silkworm,
and entomologist virtual exhibits.
I am an entomologist by
academic training, currently employed creating web pages, and a lifelong
collector of postage stamps. I am planning to use this site
to develop additional skills at web page development and to explore
the potential of the web in philately.
In July 1998 the ATA national
meeting (and the national meeting of the ATA Biology Unit) was here
in Washington DC. I went to look at the exhibits. Even at that meeting
there were NO exhibits of insect or related stamps. So I have
been thinking about what that means:
1. With actual exhibits
in actual shows, even the biggest shows cannot hold even one exhibit
on all of the potential exhibit subjects.
2. Even the largest stamp
show in the world is accessible to only an insignificant percentage
of the worlds collectors.
On the other hand, an ever
increasing percentage of collectors are obtaining internet access.
So in the virtual world the situation is completely reversed:
1. There is no practical
limit on the number and range of virtual stamp collections online
2. Everyone on the planet
with internet access can look at any virtual exhibit. On the
internet distance has no meaning
If I can put an image and
description of every bug stamp online, eventually someone can
put a similar reference collection up for all other stamp subjects.
Later I want to experiment
with the use of databases on the web
More soapbox later
- its more fun to post stamps.