by C. L. Easey

Created on: February 06, 2009

Coins can sorted and inventoried using various methods to house and store them. Various methods to inventory coins include separating them by denomination, by type and also by the years in which they were minted. Individual coins have their own unique mint mark to indicate which city the United States Mint produced the coin.

One way to sort an inventory coins is by their denomination. That is sorting each type of coin by how its face value. Depending on the coins age an inventory can include pennies, nickels, dimes, quarter dollars, half dollars and dollar coins. Some older coins have denominations such as a half-dime or half-penny, but these are generally rarer coins. Each denomination can then have its own mini collection of its own. Inventorying coins by their denomination has many advantages because the coins will already be separated into their respective types.

Another type of categorization of coins would be to separate them by type which would include precious metals. Coins contain a combination of metals depending on the type of coin and its respective denomination. Silver Eagle coins were made out of mostly silver while the one cent coin was made from copper and tin. The same can be said for gold coins such as the five dollar gold coin as well. One downside to this type of inventory scheme is that individual coins need contain the proper type of metal or the inventory will not be correct.

The best way to sort various coins is by the year they were minted. The year is important for coins because the quantity of coins minted for a particular type can be different from one year to the next. The lower the quantity that was minted means that those coins are going to be more rare that higher quantity minted coins and are worth more. Another reason the year is important is because it indicated when a particular coin's design was changed. This is why there are various types of coins based on how long the design appears on a coin. One example would be the Indian Head cent and the Lincoln Cent or Wheat penny.

Each coin generally has a mint mark to indicate where a particular coin was produced. The United States Mint has produced coins in various cities over the years. These include Carson City, Denver, San Francisco, Philadelphia and West Point. Currently the United States Mint uses mints located in Philadelphia and Denver to produce coins that go into circulation.

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