Rectification. It sounds vaguely medical, but at least it’s a better header than “Statistics”. Just for fun we thought we’d reveal some of the process we need to go through after each round of card entry. We wish we got it exactly right the first time, but of course that never happens.

So here goes. Any or all of these happen all the time, and we have to catch them, and rectify them.

* Typing mistakes

* Putting wrong information into the text. Often, online sources are incorrect (more often than you might imagine) and someone calls us out on this. We are happy to make corrections quickly.

* Putting a card with the right index number into the wrong category. These can be really hard to find.

* Typing the wrong index number, maybe inverting digits.

* The scanned photo doesn’t match the card’s description. When we enter cards, all we have to see is the assigned label, not the picture. That comes later, which usually means “too late”. Happily this is rare.

* Assigning the wrong category, for example calling something a museum when it isn’t or never was. This is rare, though, and we nearly always have a good reason for putting a card into any given category no matter how strange it looks.

* The scan didn’t get cropped correctly, or is upside down. That just means we got interrupted and distracted.

* Our topical comments go out of date. We were more guilty of this long ago: what was “new” or even “contemporary” then, may not be now. But sorry, unless someone says something, we’re not going to go back and change those descriptions.

* The postcard continues to age, so the grade might change. We compensate for this by verifying cards before customers pay.

We (the editorial “we,” not the royal “we”) want this site to be accurate, informative, humourous, and sometimes persuasive. If and when someone invents a magical machine where we can insert the card and it suddenly appears in the website, all scanned and graded and described perfectly, we will buy it. Until then … bear with us while we try to get it right.

Bye for now.