WAYNE'S NUMISMATIC DIARY: OCTOBER 25, 2015

This week my role as a consultant to the Newman Numismatic Portal (NNP) took me across the country to San Francisco, where I attended a great conference at the Internet Archive. "Building Libraries Together" was attended by librarians and Internet Archive staff from around the world. I had been impressed by the organization in the past, and came away even more so. Attending with me were NNP Project Coordinator Len Augsburger, and Chris Freeland and Robert Manley of the Washington University Libraries at Washington University in St. Louis.

First, some background on the organization:

Those stats are out of date - the Wayback Machine alone now holds over 439 billion (yes, billion with a "b") web pages and over 8 million books (and 1,000 and counting of these are NNPs). Sure, Google Books has more, but it's a commercial firm with commercial interests at heart. Archive.org is a nonprofit completely committed to the effort (which Google has quietly dropped the ball on). And it's in for the long haul. The REALLY long hall. Their leadership isn't just interested in preserving this digital material for the next 50 years - they're thinking 500 years and beyond.

To me, Brewster Kahle and his team at Internet Archive are today's 'Monuments Men' See the articles linked below for more information.

Our initial connection with IA is in the digitization realm. Via a contract with Washington University in St. Louis (WUSTL) and the NNP, Internet Archive installed state-of-the-art scanning equipment at WUSTL and sent a technician to set it up and train WUSTL staff.

While robots may take over this task in the future, people are still the best page-turners for this repetitive but important task. With human help the machines digitize two pages at once to the current tune of about 7,000 pages a month.

The staff and volunteers I spoke with were amazing. This is a very talented and dedicated group of people. They are working on a number of features, enhancements and projects that could benefit users of the Newman Numismatic Portal as well as the entire Internet Archive community.

It was a nice quick trip. I saw little of San Francisco besides the airport and the drive there and back, but I was glad to get there. The Internet Archive headquarters is in a great old building, a former church bordering on the Presidio. It's a fitting structure - a temple of knowledge. Our main conference sessions took place in the former sanctuary under an amazing dome.

The high-tech outfit has a great human side. Everyone was friendly and helpful. And in a riff on the Terracotta Warriors of China, every employee who reaches their three-year mark is memorialized with a personal "mini-me" statue. Very cool.

Anyway, thanks again to our hosts and to the Eric P. Newman Numismatic Education Society (EPNNES) for making the Newman Numismatic Portal project possible. Stay tuned, everyone.

To visit the Internet Archive site, see:
https://archive.org

To visit the NNP Collection on Internet Archive, see:
https://archive.org/details/newmannumismatic

To read some good articles on the Internet Archive, see:
The Creator of the Internet Archive Should Be the Next Librarian of Congress (www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2015/09/10/
brewster_kahle_creator_of_the_internet_archive_
should_be_the_next_librarian.html)
Introducing the Archive Corps (www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/09/
introducing-the-archive-corps/403135/?utm_source=SFTwitter)

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