TIPS FOR NAVIGATING THE ANS WEBSITE

At our February meeting of the New Jersey Numismatic Society (NJNS), Scott Miller presented an overview of how to access the ANS website to search for information about coins and medals. Once on the ANS website, he directed us to the listings for Online Resources, Collections and the ANS archives. Some of the ANS archives are available on the Newman Numismatic Portal. For others, you will need to write to the ANS for more information. The ANS homepage can be viewed for current information, recent blog posts and videos. The library catalog DONUM is an excellent resource for bibliographic information.

ANS online sources are mostly about ancient coins. Scott showed us how to conduct online searches for ancient coins on MANTIS, as well as subject specific resources, such as Hellenistic Royal Coins (HRC), Online Coins of the Roman Empire (OCRE), and Seleucid Coins Online (SCO). In addition to searching MANTIS by coin type and denomination, you can search by the donor's name or accession number. He also showed us how to find World War I medals and information on the Jewish-American Hall of Fame. Miller explained the Jewish-American Hall of Fame website is now administered by the ANS.

Next, we explored the Medallic Art Company Archives (MACO) and the MACO Specimen Archive, which has numbered dies. The MACO listings are available by decade. If you plan to visit the ANS headquarters in New York City, you can look up what you want to see before your visit to be efficient with your time.

During the meeting, NJNS President Ray Williams related how he and Jesse Kraft tackled a project for several months during COVID-19, which involved improving the data on the ANS website regarding the Society's colonial coin and paper money holdings. Ray explained they each worked from home, going through ANS holdings one item at a time over the phone, verifying that information was accurate and adding information.

I came away from our February meeting with renewed appreciation for the ANS website as a valuable numismatic research tool. And, if you haven't been to the ANS archives in person, it is definitely worth a visit. In 2017, I accompanied Dave Bailey to the ANS, and we had a wonderful time there!

NOTE: I am grateful to Scott Miller for reviewing an earlier draft of this article.

To visit the sites, see:
https://numismatics.org/
https://numismatics.org/hrc/
https://numismatics.org/ocre/
https://numismatics.org/MACO/
https://amuseum.org/

	NBS (coinbooks.org) Web