Searching on the Newman Numismatic Portal

Boosibri

The search features on the portal are effectively worthless. To do any practical research one must go catalog by catalog . Case in point, I am researching the 1867 - 1868 Chilean proofs made at the Philadelphia mint by James B Longacre. The Newman search returns 4 results for "1868 Chile". I have found 43 records in fact going catalog by catalog. Frustrating.

Now, in doing so I found a trick to share... most of the auction catalogs on the Portal are in fact from the ANS which has them properly digitized and available on Archive.org. While still not easy, a search of the text for the same returns hundred of potentials of catalogs which contain both the words 1868 AND Chile and further Boolean logic can limit those combinations further.

Another tip, the ANS has multiple catalogs of the same sale. While the Newman portal only shows one. I have found some amazing annotated old sale catalogs on the Archive.org search which don't show in the Portal for that reason.

So, for auction research, go to https://archive.org/details/americannumismaticsociety and try starting there vs. the huge potential but frustrating to navigate Newman Portal.

PeakRarities

Thanks for that, I’ve had very little luck in the NNP for the reason you mentioned, worthless search feature that yields 0 results. I’ll play around with this later but it looks like it will be easier to use for me.

Coinosaurus

Searches on Newman Portal (and the Internet Archive repository) are exact text only. "1868 Chile" is searching for that exact phrase.

There is another search page on NNP, https://nnp.wustl.edu/library/powersearchform, that works better in this case. On this page, try:

ItemContent:1868 AND ItemContent:Chile AND ItemContent:proof AND ItemContent:decimo

Check "full view only." This will identify pages containing all the words: 1868, Chile, proof, and decimo.

One other note - if you wish to use the Internet Archive repository directly, you will get more results using https://archive.org/details/newmannumismatic than https://archive.org/details/americannumismaticsociety. This first link includes both the material scanned at ANS (under NNP sponsorship) and by NNP directly. We have over 14,000 auction catalogs on NNP, of which about 6,700 were scanned at ANS.

You can always email NNP (NNPCurator@wustl.edu) for assistance.

Boosibri

Thanks Len. Even that search pulls up a small fraction of the material which it should. I’ll drop you some examples.

jonathanb

I've never had an auction catalog return in an NNP search, even when searching for a single word. It looks to me that the auction catalogs are simply excluded from the search index.

jonathanb

Simple example for the first reasonably distinctive word that came to mind: https://nnp.wustl.edu/library/searchwithterms?searchterm=counterbrockage

That search returns a handful of auction catalogs. So the auction catalogs aren't completely excluded. But there should be hundreds of matches in auction catalogs, not a handful.

yspsales

Stacks or one of the other majors have a library of color catalogs in PDF format dating waaaay back.

Easy link right thru their website.

NNP is a struggle to say the least.

Mostly use it for the Lisot video archives.

lilolme

@jonathanb said:
Simple example for the first reasonably distinctive word that came to mind: https://nnp.wustl.edu/library/searchwithterms?searchterm=counterbrockage

That search returns a handful of auction catalogs. So the auction catalogs aren't completely excluded. But there should be hundreds of matches in auction catalogs, not a handful.

.
One problem with searches is that they are not consistent from one source to another. This can make it difficult to figure out how one works versus another. And of course how well they work also varies.

On this example of the counterbrockage I went to Heritage auction archives or view past sales. There are over a million items there initially.
Narrowing the search to counterbrockage returned just 45 items.
Using two words counter brockage returned 14 items.
Using just brockage returned 1538 items. (which includes other types of brockage)

So from this it would appear that counterbrockage is not found that often. I don't know how numerous they are though.

On the NNP having messed with it some I will say it is not all that intuitive. But coinosaurus noted some searches using the power search.
On the advanced search one can select the content type, in this case auction catalog and 4795 records are found or 4433 if selecting full view only.
Entering counterbrockage with the auction catalog it goes down to 7 items.
Using two words counter brockage only 8 items.
And then using just brockage with auction catalog there are 1195 records found or 1193 if using full view only.

Seems similar to Heritage result but I did not review anything. So could be some hiccups in there that are not identified here.
Is this good, bad or indifferent - I don't know.

BStrauss3

search via google

add "site:nnp.wustl.edu" e.g. "trime" site:nnp.wustl.edu

You will also find a lot of their documents are actually stored on the internet archive (archive.org) and searchable again through google.

WCC

I've only looked in the NNP once, for Peru, Bolivia, and Guatemala pillar minors.

I only searched the major sales, mostly Stacks due to the experience of the OP.

The coins weren't worth hardly anything at the time of the sales which might have had something to do with my resuts, but I didn't find hardly anything.