THE MAJOR ERAS OF NUMISMATIC RESEARCH

John Kraljevich's observation that the first three Pogue catalogs would each have been a pound heavier if the riches revealed by the Newman Numismatic Portal had been available when they were being researched and written sparked an insight: Like Gaul, the history of numismatic research is divided into three parts.

The Pre-Internet Era
Starting from 1514, when Guillaume Bude wrote De Asse et Partibus Eius, numismatic researchers had to do it the hard way, casting their nets far and wide for sources, trekking from libraries, to private holdings, to archival repositories, and back to all again, searching for sources, sifting through possibilities,sorting the relevant from the irrelevant, sending letters hither and yon, and finally writing it all out in longhand. The achievements of men like Sylvester Sage Crosby, C. Wyllys Betts, and William S. Baker while toiling under these disadvantages is a matter for wonderment.

The Internet Era
Starting in 1990 (for computer geeks only), or 1994 (with Yahoo! and Lycos), and September 4, 1998 (with Google), things got dramatically better for the numismatic researcher, for search engines made it possible to reach previously-unimaginable sources of information, all without having to travel or to subsidize the postal service.

Search engines were the great equalizer, making any of us feel like S.S. Crosby for a day when we found some important, but heretofore obscure fact in Mr. Google's haystack. That was the problem, though--it was a haystack, with millions of stalks returned to you for every search. There were needles of information hidden within, but who had the time (or fanaticism) to search through tens of thousands, much less millions, of completely pointless links? Nor was it possible that even Google had the algorithms necessary to find every pertinent numismatic fact.

The Newman Numismatic Portal Era
Starting March 10, 2016, another epoch opened in numismatic research. The Newman Numismatic Portal began providing content that had been chosen, scanned, and aggregated to be relevant to specific numismatic searches. When fully built out, the NNP will offer Google's encyclopedic reach without Google's millions of irrelevant results. NNP will be what the numismatic researcher has always wanted, but never before had: an accurate index to every numismatic publication, a reliable guide to all things on topic.

The NNP will reveal those facts of consequence and those seemingly of little moment, but, crucially, everything, every relevant thing, listed there for the researcher to ponder, decide, and to use. There will be more Crosbys and Bakers among us, because our tools have become infinitely better. A golden age of numismatic research and writing has begun, and we will date it to March 10, 2016 when the Portal first opened for us.

Future Eras

It's a great time to be a numismatist. Use of the Newman Numismatic Portal should by now be mandatory for anyone beginning research on American numismatics. But as valuable as it is, NNP will only continue to get better over time, not only as new content is added, but as new features appear and evolve.

Science fiction author William Gibson once said, "The future is already here — it's just not very evenly distributed." So we don't have to wait for some new space-age technologies to be invented - they're already here. Technologists in government and industry are already making use of tools and techniques that could one day speed numismatic research by yet another order of magnitude - things such as image recognition, feature extraction,and machine-learning based classification systems.

With continued support and development, important new features could one day come to NNP and many of your favorite numismatic web sites. What would your ideal "EASY BUTTON" look like? What would it do for you? -Editor

To visit the Newman Numismatic Portal, see:
http://www.newmanportal.org

To read the earlier E-Sylum article, see:
BUILDING THE D. BRENT POGUE COLLECTION (www.coinbooks.org/esylum_v19n16a05.html)

	NBS (coinbooks.org) Web