ON VANISHING NUMISMATIC WEBSITES

I was updating my website and was sad to find that many of the numismatic websites that were very active 10-15 years ago are no longer online. Some may have moved to different locations, but in many the domain hosting has expired, domains purchased by other parties exploiting pre-existing links and used for marketing.

Some are archived at http://web.archive.org/ and some other sites like archive.is. However, we can't expect these archive sites to last for ever and some stop archiving and what is preserved is an old copy.

We buy and keep books safe in libraries, but some websites are allowed to fade away without a trace but a lot of broken links. How many of The E-Sylum Featured Web Sites still remain online 10-15 years later?

Isn't it time that the numismatic community set up a procedure to archive the Numismatic websites to ensure they don't get lost?

One of the reasons for publishing in The E-Sylum extensive excerpts of articles and information found on web sites is just this fact: in time, the web sites change, move or disappear completely, leaving behind dead links. At least some of that numismatic content has been saved, albeit in a different electronic-only form.

The Newman Numismatic Portal team is aware of this problem, and is considering solutions to mitigate it. We hope someday to archive at least some of the more important numismatic web sites, particularly the smaller noncommercial ones that without steady funding tend to come and go on the whims and personal situation of their owners. When people die, their web sites usually go with them. That's why The E-Sylum isn't just a personal blog, but is affiliated with a society that will outlive its current Editor and helpers, and is already archived on the NBS web site and partially backed up on the Newman Portal.

As a longer-term project started earlier this year, I've been compiling and organizing a list of active numismatic web sites culled from The E-Sylum's Featured Web Site section, major club and dealer sites and elsewhere on the web. It was no surprise to find that many, many of these links are broken with no forwarding address left behind.

If you can recommend particularly useful favorite numismatic web sites, or would like to assist us by compiling lists of such sites, please contact me at whomren@gmail.com . Thanks. -Editor