The Short-Lived Nature of Hobby Websites
Zoins
Posts: 34,113 ✭✭✭✭✭
I've noticed that quite a few hobby websites have disappeared over the years.
Here's one I just ran across again by D.A. Smith, which was done by thousands of hours oof Internet searches and talking to people who knew Robert McNamara of Heraldic Art.
http://www.heraldicartmedallions.com/
My interest in the late Robert McNamara of the Heraldic Art Medals Co. began in 2010 with the passing of my father. He was one of Robert’s original subscribers in the company’s Heraldic Art Medals mail-order program. When going through my father’s collection I found 61 of these medals, which I had never seen before.
[...]
Over the last four and a half years, I have literally spent hundreds if not thousands of hours searching the internet, making trips to Cleveland, Ohio, where Robert lived, and searching for people who could share information about him.
[...]
In my travels, I attended many coin shows as I had hopes of acquiring medals that I didn’t yet have. I was fortunate to be able to meet people who knew Robert and his family personally, and learned a lot from those trips. As a result I wanted to share what I had learned with others and started my own website (www.heraldicartmedallions.com) to share that information for those who were also searching. I hope to update and add more information to that site in the very near future.
@tmot99 's site has also been offline: http://1893columbianexpo.com/
It's kind of sad this information is lost due to the ephemeral nature of websites.
Comments
Often some or all of the material on expired sites can be found at archive.org.
Sometimes the photos are missing, but sometimes not.
https://web.archive.org/web/20160326090518/http://www.heraldicartmedallions.com/
https://web.archive.org/web/20160401153538/http://1893columbianexpo.com/Eglit_1-100.html
But in general, I agree. The "half-life" of a website can be short.
So I will often save everything to my hard drive if a site has material that is of high interest to me and is not available elsewhere.
Websites concerning thin market items just don't last. There aren't enough people who care about them.
Archiving information on storage units (1 and 2 terabyte units are widely available now) works for a personal digital library. However, the nature of the internet is not the same as a real library. Yes, websites expire and die and information is lost. I can see a future endeavor that will preserve this information, however, due to the vast storage and maintenance required, it will likely be governmental rather than private. Funding the research and storage requirements would be extensive. Cheers, RickO
Cost money - make a donation to the sites you use.
WS
I know 1-2TBs is all most users will ever need, but this made me chuckle a little bit. I work on multimedia projects that require huge amounts of data and just five months ago built a new personal UnRAID server and upgraded from 40TB to 100TB of storage (10 x 10TB drives). Again, I have a very specific use case scenario for it, and I know the 1-2TB drives are all most need. Instagram post from the day the hard drives arrived:
Back to OP's point though, yes, it's a shame when information like this disappears, especially as we move further and further away from having anyone alive who lived through these events/releases and can offer first-hand or even second-hand experiences.
My eBay Store | My Registry Profile
Few hobby websites generate their cash from authenticating stuff.
When I arrive at a reference website, I treasure my ability to retain the knowledge stored there. You can't beat an old book. Peace Roy
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Newman Portal is quietly archiving many numismatic websites via Internet Archive's Wayback Machine. This material is all on the Wayback Machine (web.archive.org) - not searchable at this point, but we consider this preservation an important part of our mission.
Going forward, the guys that figure out how to preserve, index, and make all of this available will have a hot commodity. Sort of like Google, but to the next level.
Electronically, I like PDFs because they can be easily copied and saved.
I've started to assembled D.A. Smith's website into such a PDF document but there's much more to go:
Heraldic Art Medals by D.A. Smith
NOTE
Old thread notice. Lots of good information and thanks those they provided
Links. I will have 2 to post soon.
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CoinsAreFun Toned Silver Eagle Proof Album
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Gallery Mint Museum, Ron Landis& Joe Rust, The beginnings of the Golden Dollar
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More CoinsAreFun Pictorials NGC
The one i miss the most is the TCCS or Toned Coin Collectors Society. Always had great info and stuff to drool over all day with newps coming in left and right
That would have been a sight! Anyone have an archive that can be posted?
I have kept mine for 20 years. Needs an update just don't have the time.
I forgot all about TCCS and I was one of the founding members!
In honor of the memory of Cpl. Michael E. Thompson
Preceded in death by the even shorter lived Ugly Coin Collecting Society
Latin American Collection
I used to like poking around for California gold information.
calgoldonline.com is long gone.........
Bummer. I was a member there
My OmniCoin Collection
My BankNoteBank Collection
Tom, formerly in Albuquerque, NM.
Use the Internet Archive Wayback Machine, Just plug in the website's name. I recommend selecting the earliest date to get a baseline of the information and move forward in dates to harvest revision changes.
web.archive.org/
Hard to beat stored files too.
This okay for determined research, but oftentimes a poor substitute for broad browsing.
Often times, you don't know what date to pick, links are broken and images are missing.
It's also hard to find thing if you don't know the site you want to search.
It's better than nothing, but often times a slow and frustrating experience.
Most of the time the website's owner does not want to pay a recurring annual fee, as a result the service provider locks out the webpage. The website's owner may also loose interest or wants the information to be lost as it was overshared after deciding to monetized the lost information by publishing the contents in a book.
As I said in an another SC50C thread and at other collector websites, the SC50C area of numismatics is ripe for a collector catalog. Until a collector catalog is published, the SC50C area will a stagnated area of collecting. Whomever writes the catalog will be crowned as the SC50C expert. It will also bestow the privilege to establish the official catalog identifiers and assigned SC50C names of each medal.
As for the contents of the heraldic art medal website, I did visit the website prior to the CoinWorld write-up and was familiar with its contents and lack of information about the Hawaii Statehood medal varieties. At one point the website owner was irritated at me because I overstepped his area of SC50C expertise (my discovery of the low and high volcano varieties was pointed out to him by one of his acquaintances after seeing it listed at an auction website). I got a not so kind email disparaging my discovery via the auction website. I just ignored him, I know what I discovered.
https://money.org/collector/drdarryl/blog/hawaii-so-called-50c-low-volcano-vs-high-volcano-variety