The E-Sylum:  Volume 6, Number 47, November 2, 2003, Article 16

AMAZON'S FULL TEXT SEARCH

  Responding to last week's item about the new full-text
  book search at Amazon.com, Ed Sible reports:
  "Three fully searchable numismatic books in Amazon's new
  program are:

  Handbook of Ancient Greek and Roman Coins (Klawans),
  http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/030709362X

  Ancient History from Coins (Howgego),
  http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/041508993X

  Coin Collecting For Dummies (Guth),
  http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0764553895"

  The December 2003 issue of Wired magazine will feature an
  article titled "The Great Library of Amazonia" by Gary Wolf.
  The article has been posted online, and I've extracted a few
  sections of note to researchers.

  "The fondest dream of the information age is to create an
  archive of all knowledge. You might call it the Alexandrian
  fantasy, after the great library founded by Ptolemy I in 286 BC.
  Through centuries of aggressive acquisition, the librarians of
  Alexandria, Egypt, collected hundreds of thousands of texts.
  None survives. During a final wave of destruction, in AD 641,
  invaders fed the bound volumes and papyrus scrolls into the
  furnaces of the public baths, where they are said to have
  burned for six months. "The lesson," says Brewster Kahle,
  founder of the Internet Archive, "is to keep more than one
  copy."

  "Books are an ancient and proven medium. Their physical
  form inspires passion. But their very physicality makes books
  inaccessible to the multi-terabyte databases of modern
  Alexandrian projects.  Books take time to transport. Their
  text vanishes and their pages yellow in a rash of foxing. Most
  important, it's still shockingly difficult to find information
  buried in books. Even as the Internet has revived hope of a
  universal library and Google seems to promise an answer to
  every query, books have remained a dark region in the
  universe of information. We want books to be as accessible
  and searchable as the Web.  On the other hand, we still
  want them to be books."

  "An ingenious attempt to illuminate the dark region of books
  is under way at Amazon.com. Over the past spring and
  summer, the company created an unrivaled digital archive
  of more than 120,000 books.  The goal is to quickly add
  most of Amazon's multimillion-title catalog."

  "And yet most books are not on the Net. This means that
  students, among others, are blind to the most important
  artifacts of human knowledge.  For many students, the
  Internet actually contracts the universe of knowledge,
  because it makes the most casual and ephemeral sources
  the most accessible, while ignoring the published books.
  "It's shameful,"

  [One key point the article makes is that the value of the
   feature is in the connections researchers can now among
   a vast array of books on all subjects.  Heretofore unknown
   mentions of numismatic topics could be brought to light.
   For example, a newly-published diary of a Civil War era
   soldier might mention the use of coins and scrip or sutler
   notes.  Such primary accounts are needles in a haystack
   today, but a powerful search tool could enable researchers
   to find them much more easily.

  To read the full article, see:
  http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,60948,00.html

  Wayne Homren, Editor

	coinbooks.org Web

The Numismatic Bibliomania Society is a non-profit organization 
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