Record Keeping

A very important aspect of the gun collecting hobby, but one that is often overlooked, is record keeping.
You should keep detailed records of the guns you own. This will aid Law Enforcement & insurance adjusters in the unlikely event that your guns are stolen, lost or damaged from fire or flood. This can help in their recovery and determine condition/value for when filing a claim.
There are several ways you can do this: you can purchase a gun data base program like My Gun Database or find a free one, there are several out there. You could create your own, using Excel or another database program.

There are other options. Before purchasing My Gun Database I used Microsoft's PowerPoint program to catalog my guns. I would take a picture of the gun, insert it into PowerPoint

Then I would add a text box with the pertinent information (make, model, barrel length, year of mfg and most importantly the serial #)

 Then save the document as a jpeg (.jpg) file, the newer versions of PowerPoint allow you to save in different formats including .pdf.

 Now you will have a picture record of your gun to hand over to the Police or Insurance

 Of course the next step is to save the pictures somewhere other than your home computer. You can burn them to a CD (to put in a safe deposit box, leave in your desk at work, give to a relative), you can add them to a thumb drive or email (or upload) them to an online account that will remain in the "cloud"