NEWMAN NUMISMATIC PORTAL UPDATE: SEPTEMBER 27, 2015

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V18 2015 INDEX E-SYLUM ARCHIVE

The E-Sylum: Volume 18, Number 39, September 27, 2015, Article 9

The Newman Numismatic Portal (NNP) continues to digitize numismatic literature and has processed 367 documents to date. These documents are available at https://archive.org/details/newmannumismatic.

The latest addition is a group of 50 U.S. Mint Reports loaned by Bill Burd, which brings the total on the Portal to over a hundred Mint Reports. Paul Hybert has loaned an early report for the year 1804 [image of front cover shown here] that will be posted shortly.

Also available is a substantial collection of Heath Counterfeit Detectors (the basis for Eric Newman’s 1991 article on the subject), in addition to a number of mid-19th century bank note reporters. The Portal is currently organizing material from Eric Newman’s personal archives and will be making some exciting announcements in the near future.

In addition, several specialty clubs have granted permission to scan and present their back journals, and announcements will be made as these come online. As reported in The E-Sylum on September 6, 2015, the Gobrecht Journal is one such publication already available through NNP.

While scanned material is currently stored and hosted on Internet Archive (archive.org link above), the Portal itself will be open in 2016 and will incorporate additional numismatic content already in electronic form. Individuals or organizations willing to share content with NNP should contact Len Augsburger, NNP Project Coordinator, at leonard.augsburger@wustl.edu.

At first I wasn’t that impressed with the idea of the NNP digitizing the Mint Annual Reports, since they’re available elsewhere on the Internet. Okay, so the quality isn’t always perfect and sometimes it’s hard to find a specific year, but at least they’re there.

And, then. . .

When I actually looked at the site, I was completely blown away. Obviously technology has moved forward! The NNP copies of the Mint reports are easy to find, easy to page through and easy to download. I can hear the cursing from every used book dealer and anyone who’s buying physical copies of the Mint Reports. The huge 1896 Mint Report seems to be complete, the modern Mint Reports are here and I can hardly wait for the reports from the 1830s.

The NNP is astonishing – there’s no other way to put it.

What an amazing gift to the numismatic community!

Thanks, Dave. The Internet Archive has been digitizing content for decades now, and the state of the art has definitely improved. We also knew there would be value in gathering content under a single access point. Things should get even easier once the main web site development is fully complete, adding features such as full-text search, grouping, tagging and a menu-based organization to provide an orderly view into each area and sub-area of the site. The Internet Archive portion of NNP is the back-end document "warehouse"; the web site will be the front-end "retail store" where users will probably do most of their shopping for numismatic information. -Editor

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