You have raised some interesting points. I think it would be a good idea to write a piece on the Serial Number DB and also to provide some simple how to's to people.
The following is my perspective on the Serial Number DB. Others please feel free to jump in and add or subtract as appropriate.
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About Notes and their Recording on CPM Forum
There are two types of catalogs now on the CPM forum. They can be accessed via the "The Notes" and "Serial Number DB" menu. "The Notes" is fairly recent and has come about because of the change in ownership of CPM Forum in the last two years.
I will talk to Serial Number DB in here.
Serial Number DB as a catalog
In simplest form there are two ways (entering notes and making sense of the available information) in which a user can work with Serial Number DB.
Firstly the Serial Number DB acts as a catalog of all the prefixes and serial numbers notes starting with journey series and to the present. Any user can enter the notes providing the following information: Prefix, Serial Number, FPN, BPN. The PN are position numbers which are marked on every note and F stands for Front and B stands for Back. This information can be easily entered by any member in a given format. The Serial Number DB keeps track of the notes entered by a user and makes this information available. For now the identity of the user is kept private although there have been talks about making it public.
Main Drivers of Serial Number DB
Print Layout and Inserts
My sense is that the main reason for the creation of this Serial Number DB was to allow researchers to study the actual print layout of bank notes on sheets. This layout information was important for those who believed that the Bank of Canada printers were inserting replacement notes in a bundle of notes with notes that were taken out of the sequence.
Reporting of Prefixes, High and Lows, Changeover Serial Numbers, Other Quirks
Another reason was to get a sense on the public distribution of notes by prefixes. This could be helpful in a number of ways since Bank of Canada does not provide any publicly verifiable information on it. It would allow the reporting of new prefixes when they first get spotted in circulation. It would give a sense of the relative amount of reported notes of a given prefix (e.g. EKZ, EKY, BSW are reported in relatively lower quantities). This can be surmised from the reporting of the high and low serial numbers of any given prefix. It would give a sense of changeovers in signatures (e.g. GHD, FKN, HCM, HBG).
In some respects the database would also permit some quirks to be explored. For instance it has been noted that the newer polymer prefixes belonging to the same Frontiers Series notes (HCV onwards or GMB onwards) are now being printed differently - sheet layout and varnish.
More Notes that are Entered Better we are Informed
Having users input information on prefix and serial number is vital for these things. Some people like me maintain their own databases. I have my own database because I have a large amount of images which I connect with the information about prefix and serial number. This is helpful to me in determining relationships of unreported patterns in bank notes and the serial numbers. When you get a chance please do read my articles in the CPM forum journals to get an understanding of this.
I hope this was helpful. I also hope that this will provide some framework for other long time members of this forum to chime in and provide their perspective.
