Your Next Steps

Managing Niches

After creating an account and logging in, the first thing to do will be to build which Niches you want to appear in your main dashboard.  Each Niche you create, whether from scratch or via niche template will automatically appear in your Niche Dashboard for easy access.  In our example, Marbles has a robust lexicon with classification & condition entries as well as visual examples.  General can be used for any type of collectible and so does not have a pre-built lexicon.  However, all Niches remember your entries as you add collectibles, so you can build your own effortlessly!

To Manage Niches:

• Click the Niche Designer button (The button will say Start Here if no Niches have yet been added).
• Find the niche you wish to modify in the list stack and click Edit
• NOTE: It is important to understand that modifying a niche AFTER collectibles have been created within that niche should be done ONLY to either add additional custom fields to track or to make semantic changes to labels.  Do NOT change existing spec labels to something that has a substantially different meaning or else the values already entered for that field for existing collectibles will no longer match.

Adding Collectibles

From the main dashboard page, click the name of the Niche for which you want to create a collectible record.  This will take you to the Niche-specific dashboard page.

If you click the Add Collectible button under the My Collectibles tile, you will get a new blank collectible record in the collector’s card view.  From here, you will have to choose Save and Edit from the card menu dropdown to proceed.  If you click the List button and choose the Add Collectible icon, you will see a window open on the Item Specifics tab of a new record.

Each field on the Item Specifics tab will have an associated choice-list that is pre-built from the associated Lexicon for the Niche.  Click on a field will load the choice-list.  In a full-screen desktop window, you can see the Lexicon area to the right which shows the choice list values with a Select button that can be used for entry into the currently selected field.  In smaller screens such as on a mobile device, starting to type any value will cause a select list to display with matching values.

Most Lexicon choice-list values are hierarchical and depend on the selected value of the previous “parent-level” field.  Entering field values in order starting with the first field is recommended in order to provide a contextual guidance through each level.  Alternatively, a user can click the Search Tree button and search across all Lexicon choice-lists in order to assign multiple classification fields in one action.

Each tab has additional fields for entering information about the collectible.  Once all the information you have has been entered on each tab, clicking the Save button will create (or update) your record.

TIP: Uploading pictures can take a few minutes, but you can select multiple pictures at once to submit.  Once the files have been selected, they begin uploading.   While the uploads are in progress, you can  switch tabs for continuing data entry while the uploads complete.   Just make sure all uploads have completed before clicking the Save button.

Seeing Your Data

There are many ways to visualize your collection once entered, including List (a running list of the most recent entries at the top), Search that uses a robust search-engine functionality with typo and fuzzy matches to return the most relevant entries, Statistics to show charts and overall counts of collectibles, as well as Storage and Smart Albums.