Greetings and welcome to Roots Vinyl Guide! This site was created to help bring some clarity to the seemingly vague world of record collecting. The vagueness was partially due to lack of confidence in understanding the various releases of given album, unknown record labels, mislabeling, general lack of standardized documentation (discographies) for the massive amounts of excellent roots reggae music, etc. The list goes on and on..
I believe that EBay has the potential to be a very nice representation of a great deal of fragmented knowledge that exists amongst the record collecting community. This information is usually contained in the auction metadata and accompanying photos. We can not always depend on the correctness of this data, but many reggae collectors will be able to make some pretty good guesses about what specific release an auction truly represents.
This site is dedicated to Reggae and Ska auctions. Every 20 minutes it adds the results of any Ebay auction from this category. The crawler will only inject auctions that have received at least one bid. I believe that metric to be a reasonable sign that at least someone didn't find the price to be outrageous. This site was created out of a love for roots reggae and dub music.
Automated auction tracking can only take the site so far. Due to constant variance and miscategorization of auctions by sellers, similarity comparisons are hard to generate. Even if EBay tightened up their record auction item attributes (record size, record speed, etc.) there would still be the possibility of the seller's lack of understanding or simple human error. I plan to help alleviate this problem by community driven, manual categorization of auction results.
It is usually clear to a record collector what record release an auction truly represents. A user of this site, in many cases, could derive the data necessary to build a release from the auction description. A user may not generate a perfectly accurate description, but with consistent refinement the auctions will be more accurately categorized. I have built some tools around the concept of mapping any arbitrary auction to a user generated release. Whenever you visit a specific auction in the future, you will see all other auctions that are mapped to that same release and be able to browse through the related data. There appears to be a wealth of reggae experts on such sites as Roots Archives and Blood & Fire. These such people are encouraged to participate on this site, as they would be the most valuable community asset.
There a now two main perspectives from which to view the site. The first is the view of the auctions themselves (which will most likely always be the most common). I look at the home page as somewhat of an index on the auction view of the site. The second is the view of the releases. As we map and associate more auctions to the releases, this view will become interesting. After a large catalog of releases gets built then there will be more possibility of automated mapping of auctions to releases.
Users of this site are encouraged to create releases for and map any auctions that they feel are interesting. After they have categorized those results, then they should categorize some more ;).
- View the details of an auction.
- Click on the 'Map This Auction' Link (if it exists.. if it does not, then the auction is already mapped)
- Enter search text into the 'Find Releases' field to see if the release already exists
- Click the item that represents the auction if it exists.
- If the release does not exist, create it using the 'Create a Release' form below
- In either case the page will reload and display related auctions and a link to the release.
- You may follow this link to get a view on the release you created and all auctions mapped to it (in this case one).
- You will see another search field under the text 'Add Ebay Item'
- Enter text in this search field and click on a result that should be mapped to this release (they are easy to delete as well if you're not initially sure)
- The new auction should be displayed on the page.
- You may keep repeating your search, as it will only list currently unmapped auctions'
Many thanks to all the I-Drens who visit the site regularly and special thanks to anyone who wants to help. Praises!
Jah Chicken