Building up this catalog

At this place all known banana labels of the world were gathered and are exhibited with greate care and accuracy. I have not done it alone. But I feel the need to document what I have done. Just to let you know even if you are not interested in and for me to remember the development phase of this catalog:

  1. Learn the technic of a content management system & cascading style sheets for developing websites. Programming this catalog with all components (adding labels, tradelist, monitor data quality, search of labels, table of contents, statistic, gallery and articles, chat, flipbooks) and constantly updating the software with about 1500 hours of work. Specify and manage the IT infrastructure at the provider. User support.
  2. Adding 14,500 labels to the catalog and updating the pictures of 11,000 existing labels of the former riehl-collection and about 5,000 other labels with scans in best quality. It was about 2000 to 2500 hours of work. Many reorganizations of the banana labels in the catalog entries to keep everything clearly arranged. That means: Each day in the last 5 years I have updated in average 5 to 7 labels with better pictures AND have also added 8 new labels. It took a significant amout of time in my live.
    1. I compared all known online collections with the catalog: Gerri, Becky, Manfred, Jochen, Josef B., Michael E and of course my own collection. There is no label published somewhere that is not added to the catalog.
    2. I flew to LA and have scanned the complete collection of John with 3014 pages and the collection from Leee with about 550 pages. Each single label at each single page I have compared with the catalog if it is new or if the pictures are of better quality.
    3. I have been in Costa Rica, Ecuador and Panama and have also scanned many unseen labels of the old collections from Luis, Pablo, Kevin, Elvis, Joseph, Italo, Stiven or Patricio.
  3. Adding the year of issue to all 'old' labels before I start to document it here at the website for all new labels. That means to compare the catalog from Gerri and from Leee and the documentation of my own collection and update the year of issue to what is plausible. 25,000 labels I have updated individually.
  4. Monitoring what other collectors are adding to avoid redundant entries. Redundant entries are in a catalog not helpful. I know all 33,800 banana labels in this catalog by first name and always check if they are new.
  5. Anual cost of 720€ for hosting the IT after investment of 4,500€ in the first 4 years for consulting in web technology and aquiring scans of John's collection.
  6. I'm also the administrator of the Facebook group and have spend time to build up a community of collectors. We are we, the collectors of banana labels. We have a social media platform, a catalog and structures to keep in touch. This is not the biggest issue but worth to mention it in this context of building up the catalog that every collector in the world knows.

This catalog has got a great value. The invest to build up this catalog was in the last 5 years about 4,500 hours of work that I have spend in front of the hated computer screen plus about 5,000€. And to mention it: Scanning banana labels and to compare it with existing labels is not really an exiting work but necessary to have the catalog. It was too much, I'm exhausted. At this moment It is impossible for me to say the catalog is for free.

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Last modified: 

Mar 2020