Catalog positioning
This page helps collection development and reference staff list ALT/FNDATA correctly in a library database catalog, A-Z database list, or subject guide. It is written to be copied into the fields a typical library database record asks for.
What the dataset is, in one sentence
ALT/FNDATA is a transaction-level pricing dataset covering the secondary market for physical luxury assets, built from auction house results and resale marketplaces, and made available to students and researchers through a free no-code sandbox.
Suggested database record fields
Database name: ALT/FNDATA
Provider / publisher: Oarbt Inc, doing business as ALT/FNDATA
Content type: Transactional pricing data; structured tables queryable by SQL; no full text
Coverage dates: Late 1990s to present, with continuous auction house and marketplace ingestion
Subject coverage: Alternative assets, auction market pricing, luxury goods secondary market, watches, jewelry and gems, handbags, fine art, works of art, wine and whisky, automobiles, motorcycles, aircraft, design, coins, and books
Geographic coverage: Global, drawn from more than 100 auction houses and resale marketplaces (with a tracked universe of up to roughly 850 houses), spanning North America, Europe, and Asia
Access model: Self-registration for a no-code sandbox (no fee, work or school email required, automatic approval); manual API key issuance for deeper programmatic access on request
Authentication: None required for the sandbox; an API key issued by the ALT/FNDATA team is required for production API access
Simultaneous users: Unrestricted for the sandbox, since each patron registers an individual account
Recommended for: Finance, economics, business, art market studies, data science, and related interdisciplinary programs
Suggested subject headings and tags
Use whichever controlled vocabulary the catalog draws on (Library of Congress Subject Headings, a local taxonomy, or free-text tags). Reasonable headings and tags include:
- Business
- Finance
- Economics
- Alternative investments
- Art market
- Auctions
- Antiques and collectibles
- Data science
- Statistics
- Financial data
- Market research
- Luxury goods industry
Discipline coverage
ALT/FNDATA sits at the intersection of a few disciplines rather than squarely inside one, so it is worth cross-listing under more than one subject area in the catalog:
- Finance and investments. Alternative data, asset pricing, and secondary markets for non-traditional asset classes.
- Economics. Price discovery, market efficiency, and demand estimation using observed transactions rather than survey or stated-preference data.
- Art market studies and art history. Auction results and provenance-adjacent transaction records for fine art, works of art, and design.
- Data science and statistics. A real, moderately messy transactional dataset suitable for SQL practice, exploratory data analysis, and coverage or bias exercises.
- Business and management. Company-to-brand mapping via stock ticker, useful for equity research and brand valuation coursework.
Suggested short description (for an A-Z database list entry)
Transaction-level pricing data for the secondary market in watches, jewelry, fine art, wine, automobiles, and other physical luxury assets, drawn from auction houses and resale marketplaces worldwide. Free no-code sandbox with self-registration for students and faculty.
Suggested long description (for a database profile page)
ALT/FNDATA is an institutional-grade dataset of secondary-market transactions in physical luxury and collectible assets, built from auction house results and resale marketplace listings. It holds more than 10 million transaction records covering roughly 7,000 brands, sourced from more than 100 auction houses and resale marketplaces, with a tracked universe of up to roughly 850 houses and coverage reaching back to the late 1990s. Categories include watches, jewelry and gems, handbags, fine art, works of art, wine and whisky, automobiles, motorcycles, aircraft, design, coins, and books.
Each record carries a pre-sale estimate range, the realized price, the sale date, the vendor or auction house, the designer or brand, the model or item title, a sold or unsold status, a price normalized to US dollars, and, where applicable, a stock ticker linking the brand to its parent company, drawn from a company mapping covering more than 2,000 public and private companies with S&P 500 sector classification.
Students, faculty, and library staff can self-register for a free, no-code sandbox with a work or school email address and are approved automatically. The sandbox includes an in-browser SQL editor, sample datasets, pre-built charts, a coverage browser searchable by company and vendor, full data dictionary and schema documentation, and CSV and JSON export. Researchers who need programmatic access beyond the sandbox can request an API key from the ALT/FNDATA team.
Comparison framing for research guides
When a subject guide already lists established financial and market data resources, ALT/FNDATA is best introduced as a complement rather than a substitute. It is useful to be explicit about what it is and is not, without disparaging the resources it sits alongside:
- Databases built around public company filings, equity pricing, and analyst estimates (for example, standard financial data terminals and SEC filing databases) cover the traditional, regulated side of markets. ALT/FNDATA covers an adjacent but different market: the secondary sale of physical luxury goods, which almost never appears in public filings and is otherwise hard to observe systematically.
- Databases focused on general business and industry news or company profiles are useful for context and narrative, but they do not provide transaction-level pricing records that a student can query directly.
- Art market or auction-result databases that some libraries already carry may overlap with ALT/FNDATA's fine art and works of art coverage, but ALT/FNDATA extends the same transaction-level structure across many more categories, and pairs it with a company-to-ticker mapping that connects a brand's secondary-market performance to its listed parent, which most single-category art databases do not offer.
The clearest way to describe ALT/FNDATA on a guide that already lists other resources is as a specialized alternative-assets pricing resource: narrower than a general financial database in the markets it covers, but considerably deeper on the specific question of what physical luxury goods actually sold for, when, and to what extent above or below their pre-sale estimate.
A note on coverage for cataloging purposes
Like most continuously ingested transactional datasets, the most recent quarters of coverage are still being backfilled as new auction results are processed, so year-over-year change in the most recent period should be read with that in mind. Longer-run counts, medians, and pricing-power ratios are stable and well suited to research and coursework. This is worth a line in any catalog note so that patrons calibrate expectations correctly; it is also, as it happens, a useful teaching point in its own right (see Data_Literacy_Session_Plan.md).