It was a surprisingly difficult job. But I took a long period off collecting to attend to it. One thing I decided to do was to accept the titles that I gave items in my gallery as "the" name I'd give them, and also accept the current order in which I had cels placed in my profolios as "the" place where I'd find them. Likewise, I accepted the storage boxes where I found sketchwork as "the" place where I'd catalog them. For a long time I'd shuffled around items from book to book, box to box, giving them better titles, pulling together cels or sketches that seemed to belong together, and adding new sets to the boxes that already held sketches from the same series. But now that my collecting habits are getting slighter, I've reconciled myself to having a couple of boxes for "new acquisitions" and leaving the others where they were.
Otherwise it was like raking leaves on a breezy day.
Then the coronavirus gave me extra days inside and the time I needed to focus on the series that I knew were in the sloppiest condition. Yesterday I finished my "gallery crawl" from one side to the other, and while I've left lots of queries where I'm still not sure where a given cel or sketch is, at least I know the basic outlines of my full collection.
Now I know that I have:
20 11x 14 Profolios of cels (not all of them full)
4 11 x 17 Profolios
1 14 x 17 Profolio
1 17 x 24 Profolio
33 14 x 11 storage boxes for normal-sized sketches
9 16 x 13 boxes of pan sketches and backgrounds
1 16 x 13 box full just of cut bags from various series
1 20 x 24 boxes for larger sketches and backgrounds
1 20 x 24 box for my complete cut of "The Healing of Koram" cels (93 in all, mostly oversized), interleaved with MicroChamber paper
and standing on one end
1 24 x 30 box for my very hugest items
A quick browse through my draft "Collection Inventory" shows that I've got larger or smaller collections of forty-seven anime series, plus twelve "lone stars" in a Miscellany gallery. Some collections are very modest, consisting of only two or three cels or sketch sets. Others take several pages to list, notably A Tree of Palme, Asatte no Houkou, Cardcaptor Sakura, Hyper Police, Inuyasha, Kamikaze Kaitou Jeanne, Magic Knight Rayearth, Powerpuff Girls Z, Rozen Maiden, Tenshi ni Narumon, and Tonde Buurin.
Currently it runs to 115 pages, just the spreadsheets of the items, though I add page breaks after each series so this is a little misleading. Still, it's the first time that I've been able to read through a description of my collection from start to finish and have a clear guide to exactly where I can find a given cel, sketch, douga, or background.
There's still work to do: a quick check of one Profolio found cases where I'd shuffled around some cels in the book, probably during the last time that I changed the cel bags. And a handful of items that I know I have (. . .somewhere
. . .) still need to be tracked down. (A few are still hiding behind their cels 
.)But it is a necessary task, especially now that the future of Rubberslug (for years the default inventory of my collection) is no longer certain, and at times it's impossible to access when I want a full description of something I've got.
I'd encourage other collectors to get onto this job sooner than I did. Twenty years is a long time, and even a handful of new cels or sketches a month totals up, decade by decade, to a daunting pile. I've been good (I confirmed during my crawl) about storing my items in an archivally sound way. Few items were damaged (usually cases where I'd not detected a strip of celotape at the original time I took possession). Most cels, happily, appeared to be in the same condition as they were when scanned, often more than fifteen years ago.
But I wish that I'd gotten to work on the inventory at the same time and saved myself a monumental task, one requiring a lockdown during a global pandemic to complete.
