ABOUT THIS ISSUE: JANUARY 12, 2025

A snowstorm hit our area last Sunday night, dropping about six inches of snow by morning and another couple inches overnight Monday. I ended up having two snow days off work. But Monday was busy as the broken link issue was reported by over twenty readers from across the U.S., Canada, Ireland and New Zealand. Thanks, everyone. After taking a break to shovel snow I got back to work with our webmaster Bruce Perdue, making multiple updates to our website - fixing typos, updating ad images, etc. On Tuesday I started drafting this issue and forwarded some articles to Garrett Ziss for formatting.

Several nice comments arrived with reader emails. Terry Freed wrote, "Thanks for all of your efforts on the newsletter. Seems like there is always something new, different, and informative."

Friday night brought more snow, and my daughter and I cleared our cars, driveway and sideway. Coming back from lunch this afternoon a neighbor was out in the street chopping up the ice covering much of the pavement. So I grabbed a shovel and helped out for over an hour. Good exercise. Finally a plow arrived and cleared much of what was left.

I had a day off on Thursday and used the time to tackle a project for the Newman Portal that had been on my to-do list for months - adding metadata to our Wayback Machine collection of archived web sites. I'd been tracking the websites in a spreadsheet, and we recently learned how we could add labels to the Internet Archive website. I needed a block of time to concentrate on the details and could never seem to get a chance. Someone literally had to die before I got a few open hours without other priorities hanging over my head - thanks, Jimmy Carter.

It took a while, but the upload finally worked. 900 of the 934 numismatic websites in the collection now have names, descriptions and category labels. For example, here's a list of 61 websites relating to medals. Some may no longer exist on the internet, but all have been archived multiple times:
https://archive-it.org/collections/9633?fc=meta_Subject%3AMedal

Here's a link to the entire collection, labeled by location, subject (coin, token, medal, paper money etc.) and type (organization, dealer, blog, etc.):
https://archive-it.org/collections/9633

The labels are still a work in progress, and the website collection hasn't been connected to the Newman Portal interface yet. Please let us know your thoughts. -Editor

Wayne Homren
Wayne Homren is the founding editor of The E-Sylum and a consultant for the Newman Numismatic Portal. His collecting interests at various times included U.S. Encased Postage Stamps, merchant counterstamps, Pittsburgh Obsolete paper money, Civil War tokens and scrip, Carnegie Hero Medals, charge coins and numismatic literature. He also collects and has given presentations on the work of Money Artist J.S.G. Boggs. In the non-numismatic world he's worked in artificial intelligence, data science, and as a Program Manager for the U.S. Department of Defense.

Garrett Ziss
Garrett Ziss is a numismatic collector and researcher, with a focus on American paper money and early U.S. silver and copper coins. He is also a part-time U.S. coin cataloger for Heritage Auctions. Garrett assists Editor Wayne Homren by editing and formatting a selection of articles and images each week. When he's not engaged in numismatics, Garrett is a Senior Honors student at the University of Pittsburgh.

Pete Smith
Numismatic researcher and author Pete Smith of Minnesota has written about early American coppers, Vermont coinage, numismatic literature, tokens and medals, the history of the U.S. Mint and much more. Author of American Numismatic Biographies, he contributes original articles to The E-Sylum often highlighting interesting figures in American numismatic history.

Greg Bennick
Greg Bennick (www.gregbennick.com) is a keynote speaker and long time coin collector with a focus on major mint error coins and US counterstamps. He is on the board of both CONECA and TAMS and enjoys having in-depth conversations with prominent numismatists from all areas of the hobby. Have ideas for other interviewees? Contact him anytime on the web or via instagram @minterrors.

John Nebel
Numismatist, photographer, and ANS Board member and Fellow John Nebel of Boulder, CO helped the ANA and other clubs like NBS get online in the early days of the internet, hosting websites gratis through his Computer Systems Design Co. To this day he hosts some 50 ANA member club sites along with our coinbooks.org site, making the club and our E-Sylum archive available to collectors and researchers worldwide.

Bruce Perdue
Encased coinage collector (encasedcoins.info) Bruce Perdue of Aurora, Illinois has been the volunteer NBS webmaster from its early days and works each week to add the latest E-Sylum issue to our archive and send out the email announcement.