Using QR Codes in Exhibits and in your own collection

A philatelic exhibition has three main viewers, whose aims are different, but you have to capture the attention of all three. These viewers are: the judges, the public and you.

When it is you, at least in my opinion, there is a lot of satisfaction in working for months, and then seeing your work displayed for all to see.

For the general public, they will pass through an exhibit and if it is an interesting subject for them, they will spend more time on it than on others. If the exhibit was awarded a very good medal, same thing, more time than on others. Many may use it to get ideas from for their own exhibits or collections or sometimes just to write an article about this. Actually some viewers may have more knowledge than you do on the subject and may find mistakes in your knowledge, or know of material that you are unaware of. I found that issue when viewing a particular exhibit at Capex22.

For the judge, poor guy, he has less than half an hour to check out your exhibit and decide what you get. Some judges are very knowledgeable, and have a wide range of knowledge. With the limited time that a judge has, he is not able to read every page and view every item. Of course the bigger the item, the more the eye will be drawn to it. It also matters where the page is on the frame. However if you have an 1870 Queen Victoria ½d Bantam stamp, where the size of the stamp is half the height of a Penny Red and that stamp is in the bottom row, then good luck to you.

So the idea is that you need to make your pages eye-catching and eye-pleasing, you need to make all viewers WANT to look at your pages and you need to direct them to special items. How do you do that? The jury is still out on that.

In my exhibit I have some stamps that I need to write a philatelic explanation of them and the philatelic explanation will be a lot bigger than the stamp itself. Exhibit regulations state that:

The presentation and the accompanying text of the exhibit should be simple, tasteful and well balanced. It should add information to that provided by the material and show the level of understanding of the subject and the personal research of the exhibitor.

Let me give an example of the dilemma. Suppose you want to use the Sachsenhausen Concentration camp parody of the Great Britain 1935 Jubilee issue. In this case, the forgers wrote “This war is a JEWSH WAR”. Here is an example of what I would like to write in the philatelic text:

Heinrich Himmler came up with the idea of counterfeiting British postage stamps in order to convey that the war was a Jewish conspiracy and an attempt by them at world domination. Forgeries of the Silver Jubilee issue of 1935 were prepared at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. Changes included the insertion of Jewish and communist emblems, placement of Stalin's head, and an inscription "This war is a Jewsh war". The years were altered to 1939-1944

If I used regular A4 paper, it would take up the width of the page. Will this catch the eye of the reader, probably, but who would want to read all that text? In my own opinion it is a presentation problem and then again, partially a development problem because most of the width is taken up. Can the text be more concise, probably a bit? Where is the problem? Not everyone knows the story! Some judges and viewers may not know of this and think that is a nice story. The exhibitor has to get the information across because although this is modern material, it is not readily available, maybe more ready today than in the past, but this falls into the category of philatelic knowledge.

Another example is the set of stamps issued in 1946 by Austria for the "Never Forget" ("Niemals Vergessen") exhibition on the crimes of Nazism. 8 stamps were designed, prepared and printed for the exhibition; however most people don’t know that at the last minute, the Allies placed a veto on two of the stamps, including this stamp on the left, as they were considered to have upsetting or unsettling imagery. Most copies of this stamp were destroyed upon orders of the allies, but of course some had already been sent to dealers etc. The stamp shown here and another was vetoed and were replaced by other stamps and the set was issued. The stamp is not a big stamp, and once again the philatelic text will be long. Again the question is, how do you both tell the audience what they need to know and at the same time, brag, after all this is not common knowledge and nor are the stamps cheap.

The solution is to use a QR Code. Most people already know what a QR Code, we get them on our monthly bills, but for those who don’t a QR code, or quick response code, is a type of barcode that can contain information. It can point to a website, an image, an audio file, send email, be a business card etc. A QR Code can be read by your smartphone camera and immediately direct you to the information. How does that help out? Again I am giving my own solution. I have a blog and a YouTube channel called “Stories Behind the Stamp” and I try to tell the reader or the viewer, the story behind the stamp. This is especially fun when dealing with PostKrieg as many don’t know the stories. So what you can do is to write a blog post and have your QR Code point to that blog post or YouTube video.

Here are two QR codes, the first pointing to my video about the German parody stamp: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AicEw-mpeco and the second the blog post about the withdrawn Austrian stamp: https://stampandstories.blogspot.com/2021/08/never-forget.html

I generate my codes from various websites on the web, including https://www.qr-code-generator.com/. Now that we have the codes, what do we do? By the way if you are using white pages, all good, but if your page is a different color, make sure that the image is transparent. Here are the two examples:
There are advantages to this method in that the viewer can take a scan of the QR Code from his phone and then it is saved in his phone’s browser. He can then read in his own free time. In addition the unexpected image next to the item, draws your attention to the item. I have used QR codes whenever the amount of text I want to write starts making the page look full of text, irrespective of the size of the item. The example I have provided are valid for your own collection as well and the use of QR codes in your collection is entirely up to you.

Note: I wrote this article almost two years ago and I was hoping it would be published in TC News but there hasn't been one!