The Football Card Cyber Museum

Welcome To The Football Card Cyber Museum (est. 2011)
by Joe McAnally

Purpose/Mission

Much like any museum (art, historical, science or natural -- cyber/virtual or otherwise), the purpose is to inform, educate, enlighten, entertain and inspire through the sharing of information, images and objects. Most of us will never own a Monet painting, but we are able to visit an art museum to see one. With many collectibles, the same is true - one may not wish to acquire every Topps or Upper Deck card ever printed, but would like the chance to view as many as possible in a friendly environment. A brick-and-mortar football card museum, while a nice idea, wouldn't reach as many people as can be reached through the Internet - a cyber museum is the ideal alternative.

Through the cyber sharing of this personal collection of cards, The Football Card Cyber Museum hopes to avoid what is happening with the Burdick Collection - a 306,353 card collection donated to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, of which only a few hundred cards are on public display at any one time. The museum is more concerned about maintaining the condition and security of the collection - but at the expense of being able to share it with regular folk. That doesn't seem right. For more on this, google the "Burdick Collection".

We would also hope this project will encourage others to build their own virtual 'museums' - no matter what they collect - so that more people can enjoy the fruits of their efforts and love of collecting.

Focus

Most card collections have a particular focus, and as such, The Football Card Cyber Museum is focused on regular Topps and Upper Deck Football cards issued in sets during the football season. Currently the collection comprises Topps complete sets from 1965. Currently, over 175 unique cards can be viewed, searched and "flipped" in the The Football Card Cyber Museum.

The Beginning

In the beginning we had an 8-year-old in 1969 with a 15 cent a week allowance who would occasionally go down a few blocks to the local convenience store to buy a few 5 cent packs of Topps baseball cards. 5 cents - 5 cards, can't get any simpler than that (although in the '50s they had penny packs). Later, a bunch of toy cowboys and Indians were traded for a neighbor's 1966 cards - and a collector was born.

Many adult collectors can share similar stories of buying their first cards as children. The simplicity and innocence of building a small collection at that age is in stark contrast to the modern day obsessions with card value, professional grading, inserts, rookie cards and price futures. These obsessions tend to suck the life blood out of the hobby; The Football Card Cyber Museum attempts, in its own small way, to pour some of that life blood back into it.

To accomplish this, The Football Card Cyber Museum does a couple of things. One is to focus on complete sets wherever possible, as opposed to individual cards (you've no doubt heard about the collector with almost 250 unique Kevin Dineen cards - google 'The Kevin Dineen Card Museum'). Another is to set aside and disregard (with the exception of a few articles on card condition) ever-changing card values.

Recent History

The cards from this collection were neatly organized by year and card number into binders. Fine. That was a step up from the big blue tubs and boxes they used to be housed in. It's fun flipping through binder pages, but to view, say, a 1965 George Blanda or 1979 Walter Payton, could take a lot of flipping. Also, what if one wanted to see cards in alphabetical order? Or say, all the 1965 Oilers? Or all the all-star cards? Or every Buuba Smith card in the collection? Or even a random ten cards from the collection (a virtual 'pack' if you will). All these queries could be answered quite easily with a database of card scans. A look around at other virtual card museums on the Internet also found card images presented in a fixed order, usually without card backs. The decision was made to scan all the cards, front and back, and to make sure that the cards could be viewed in a number of creative and fun ways, to encourage browsing.

Additional Impetus

How many people have a copy of the "Topps Baseball Cards" book put out by Warner Books in 1992? You'd have to get an overpriced used copy now, as it is out of print, but it contained color card images from Topps cards from 1951 through 1990. The downsides? The images were kind of small; there were no card backs; the images are organized as if they were in a binder, by year and card number; the cards pictured only ran through 1991; and - it's out of print. Other than that it was a good book! Clearly a database which could be updated and searched would serve the public's needs a bit better - thus, the idea of The Football Card Cyber Museum was born and nurtured.

Specifications

Each card was scanned, front and back, at 150 dpi, using a typical consumer grade scanner. Over 300 scans were required to build the museum to the current level. Scanners are far from perfect (and all those charming old cards are not all the same size - who knew?), so the resultant scans frequently needed a bit of trimming for a clean look. For the eternally curious, even with keeping one eye on a baseball or football game, about 65 scans an hour were possible. Thus, about 6+ man-hours were required just for image processing. Then, each card was cataloged by set, card number, name, sort name, team, card type, etc. into an SQL database.

Cost

The Football Card Cyber Museum is not a commercial site, it is free to browse and use the site.

No Google ad words, no Amazon book links, no EBay listings for goofy products - no silly ads, period. If you've ever clicked on any of those ads, you know you usually end up at a web site that falls somewhere between a complete waste of time and a total waste of time.

This is a football card museum. Some decorum please. You're welcome.

Visitor Pass

Due to bandwidth constraints, the lack of silly ads, and the free nature of the museum (and also to keep the search engines from ruining the site with their robots and incessant "site hammering"), access to the museum is granted to 200 visitors at any one time. Visitors are given a free user ID and password (think of it as your virtual access card), and each visitor is enabled access for one month (30 days), at which point they can sign up to renew access for another month - and so on.

Gift Shop

Every museum has a gift shop. Except this one, since there's nothing for sale. Let's call it the exception that proves the rule.

Copyrights

This goes without saying, but we will state it anyway. All images and accompanying text on scanned cards are copyrighted by the respective companies that produced the sets. All articles and their accompanying text are copyrighted by their respective authors. No ownership of this information is held or implied by the author of this site. As former Topps Inc. shareholders, we can assure you that any commercial use of the images on this site will probably lead to some form of litigation.

The mission of the site is to inform, educate, enlighten, entertain and inspire through the sharing of information, images and objects; all programs, files, images, text and data on the site support this mission.

Affiliations

This site is current not affiliated with, nor supported by, The National Football League, the NFLPA, Topps Inc., Upper Deck, nor any of the many fine football card organizations and associations around the globe.

Thanks

It still takes good people and generous organizations to run a free site. Thanks to Google.com for affordable (nearly free) image hosting. Special thanks goes out to Dan McAvinchey at Guitar Nine Records for allowing The Football Card Cyber Museum web site to be hosted free of charge on his company's web server. There's a cropped, off-center, slightly gum-stained 1965 Bob Petrich in your future bud, I can feel it!