WHAT'S NEXT AT THE NEWMAN NUMISMATIC PORTAL

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V21 2018 INDEX E-SYLUM ARCHIVE

The E-Sylum: Volume 21, Number 43, October 28, 2018, Article 5

Last week I was so busy working on E-Sylum obituaries that I forgot to announce that I would be speaking about the Newman Portal at the Whitman Baltimore Expo. To get the word out, we improvised. First, Len Augsburger published an announcement to the NNP email list and Facebook account. Then I sent it out by email to friends and readers I thought might be attending the show. Several sent regrets, but there were also enough positive responses that I no longer feared speaking to an empty room. Here's the announcement. -Editor

Newman Numismatic Portal Goes on the Road

Wayne Homren, Newman Numismatic Portal consultant, will be speaking at the Whitman Baltimore Expo on Friday, October 26, at 1pm in room 301 of the Baltimore Convention Center. Come and hear about the latest Newman Portal content updates and future direction. See you there!

Some of those unable to attend (including Yale Lansky, Peter Bertram, Robert Hoge and others) asked if information on my talk would be available online, so below is a summary. We had a nice turnout. Attendees included Len Augsburger, Bill Bugert, Bill Eckberg, David Gladfelter, Maureen Levine, Roger Siboni, Alan Weinberg and Garrett Ziss. Dennis Fortier of the Liberty Seated Collectors Club (LSCC) filmed a video that hopefully we can post at a later date. -Editor

I opened with a few slides giving an overview of the Newman Numismatic portal, including our founder Eric Newman's vision and the organization structure, including Washington University in St. Louis, the Internet Archive, and consultants including myself and the software developers.

Audiences enjoy learning about the mechanics of digitization. I explained that despite numerous attempts no one has yet developed a robot that does a better job than humans at turning pages without mishaps. So the scanning of printed books and other materials is human-powered, with a librarian or student at the controls of a custom-built scanner with an angled cradle that takes high-resolution images of both left and right-hand pages simultaneously. Designed for the Internet Archive, it has integrated software that uploads images to the web where post-processing is done, including optical character recognition (OCR). Here's student Kevin Ha at work.

Next I reviewed the major content types - Books, Periodicals, Auction Catalogs, Images and Archival Material, illustrating each with a selection of images. Here are some selected periodicals.

While discussing periodicals I touched on one of the upcoming features we're working on. Now that there is so much material in the portal we want to provide more useful ways to organize and discover it. To better organize the periodical section, we're adding tags to classify them by type - commercial publications, club journals, dealer house organs, fixed price lists, etc. Here's some of the sausage-making in action - I'm adding a periodical type column to a spreadsheet.

Other new initiatives include the creation of image collections for the Newman colonial paper money collection, a new online edition of Newman's The Early Paper Money of American book, "Advanced Search" and "Power Search" features. Further out on the horizon are personalization features like favorites lists, user collections and tagging, plus a numismatic web site archive.

We concluded with a question and answer session addressing both site content and user features, including desired search features.

Many thanks to John Frost of LSCC and the Barber Coin Collector's Society for lending us the projector and extension cord!