Year-Based Series Structuring for Cinderellas

[drabarthel]

With this post, I would like to raise a fundamental question for discussion concerning the year-based division of series and its application under the Colnect guidelines in the field of Cinderellas.

Unlike official postage stamps, Cinderellas of a given country are typically issued by multiple different institutions. The issuing body therefore represents one of the most important criteria for organization and searchability from a collector’s perspective.

Accordingly, in many Cinderella sections on Colnect, the issuing institutions are either explicitly named in the series title or can be clearly inferred from it. This allows collectors to retrieve all issues of a particular issuer across multiple years using the series filter.

If, in such cases, the series are additionally split by year, this provides no added value in terms of usability: The year is already available as a separate filter criterion, while dividing the series by year actually makes it more difficult—or even impossible—to view all issues of a given issuer in a coherent way. This applies both to series with an explicitly named issuer and to those where the issuer is implicitly but unambiguously defined by the series title (e.g., Christmas Seals in the USA or Tuberculosis Charity Seals in Sweden).

Against this background, I currently see three possible approaches to addressing this issue:

Clarification in the guidelines

Adding a note to the Colnect guidelines stating that, for Cinderellas where the issuer can be identified directly or clearly indirectly from the series title, an additional division of the series by year is not required.

Introduction of a new filterable attribute “issued by”

Implementing a dedicated, systematically filterable issuer field for Cinderellas (programmatically more demanding).

Modification of Colnect catalog codes

Extending catalog codes to include a standardized issuer identifier, allowing all issues of a given issuer to be retrieved via the “catalog code” filter (editorially very labor-intensive).

I personally consider option 1 to be the most practical and conceptually sound solution, but I am deliberately presenting all three options for discussion and would welcome alternative suggestions from the community.

[Tyroxin]

The series feature is our system in place to group issues with a common design, topic, release time (in roughly that order). Other platforms would group such labels into a set.

Organizing series by issuer has precedence, compare the series of the various German private and local sections. iirc, German States had a similar series structure before they were promoted to country entities.

However, at some point, such sub-country/entity series get unwieldy. There was a time in the Italy:Revenue category, when _all_ revenue stamps were in a single several hundred items large 'Revenue' series. This series coverd well over hundred years and included several very distinct design epochs. It has since been broken up along design changes, allowing collectors that are only interested in a particular design epoch to get a comprehensive list of items in that design.

Pointing to the year available as separate filter criterion falls flat in at least two situations. First; there may be overlap in the usage of designs, preventing the use of individual years to separate them. Second; for long active designs, multiple selection would run into the very same problem you invoke, when considering series thoroughly split by year incapable for at-once-viewing.

Option 4: Deliberate use of the Name field, compare the Ardatov design of several zemstvo agencies. https://colnect.com/en/stamps/list/coun ... me/ardatov

4b, same might work in the Description field, but that is way more in flux and even less standardized.

[DJCMH]

The point with the series function is to have stamps that are of the same "set" grouped together in discrete, managable units.

If i am understanding correctly, the issue here is with having stamps by a same producer being split along year of issue lines for that issuer.

I am not sure why this is problematic? I would think it would be better organization to have issues by Organization X that has been producing issues for many years to be split by year of issue as a series rather than having them grouped altogether in one long several dozen or several hundred item single series for quick ease of reference when going through the series list.

Re option 3 - that would be a good goal moving forward for those issuers that are known, so that each issuer does indeed have its own set 'country code' within the cinderella section. The more unique a codes are for identification purposes the better.

[drabarthel]

The core issue is that, up to now, all Cinderellas issued by a given issuer can be retrieved in a single consolidated view using the “Series” filter, whereas splitting them by year reduces this to fragmented year-by-year slices.

Option 3 would indeed allow a comparable consolidated overview if one filtered by the Colnect code—since that code contains the relevant issuer abbreviation. However, this would require users to already know that abbreviation, which is far less intuitive than a series name that is immediately visible. In addition, with the exception of a lot of Danish Christmas Seals an the Mexican TB Seals, virtually all other Cinderellas would need to be recoded in order to preserve usability for Cinderella collectors.

Using the series field as an issuer index—without breaking it down by year— is therefore, in every respect, the least labor-intensive and most practical solution for Cinderella collectors.

[drabarthel]

The trigger for this round of discussion was the decision to split the Swedish Tuberculosis Charities (a single issuer)—comprising roughly 580 Cinderellas in total—into more than 20 year-based subdivisions. There are countless Cinderella issuers that typically release only a handful of items per year. These are not meaningful “year slices,” but rather tiny year fragments. And in all cases where only a single issue appears in a given year, that issue remains part of the overall—and thus residual—series.

[southampton59]

Of course non-Cinderella collectors cannot understand the problem they don't have to keep clicking in and out for each year. In Sweden up to and including 1959 all tuberculosis stamps are together, then divided into years even when some years only have 2-3 stamps. So to go through them you have to keep clicking in and out of each year.

Before it was easy to go right through them, if you wanted a specific year you could simply use the year filter the same way you would for "ordinary" stamps, now there is no choice.

[DJCMH]

If it is felt that for cinderellas it would be better to leave all items produced by a producer in one larger group, then as lead editors of the cinderella section please make the changes that you feel will make the catalogue easier to use for collectors of cinderellas. I do not collect cinderellas myself, so I will defer to those who have more experience with the material.

[drabarthel]

Thank you very much for this clarification. I will re-organize the Swedish Tuberculosis Charities into a system that is usable for collectors. Thank goodness no one had yet started to divide up the American Lung Association's Christmas Seals, for example, which have 976 entries in Colnect, into different years...

[Jeroen-Janssen]

The point with the series function is to have stamps that are of the same "set" grouped together in discrete, managable units.

The most extreme example of a current 'series' that is anything but a discrete, managable unit is in the Denmark https://colnect.com/nl/stamps/list/coun ... tmas_Seals with 4498 items.

[drabarthel]

in deed, this is overwhelming compared to regular postage stamps and for their collecors, but for cinderella stamp collectors it can be handled and is more user friendly than dividing them up by years ...

Anyone who wishes to view the Cinderellas of a particular issuing body for a specific year will, by the way, find an easy solution even within this immensely extensive series in Colnect — a series for which I bear primary editorial responsibility.

Bildschirmfoto zu 2026-02-11 19-59-16.png

Incidentally, this solution would be foreclosed if the series were subdivided by year. In that case, one would be confined to those annual groupings, with no practical way to view or organize all Cinderellas of a specific issuing authority in a consolidated manner.

PS: In a private message to Jeroen-Janssen, I attempted to defuse the situation and to ask for understanding regarding the specific concerns of Cinderella collectors, particularly with respect to usability and practical navigation within the catalog. Apparently, that effort was not successful.