The Numismatist Digital Archives Go Live December 1st!

GregL

I mentioned this would be coming up earlier this year, but we now have a launch date!

Starting December 1st, ANA members will have online access to every issue of The Numismatist going back to 1888!

The Numismatist Digital Archives

A great reason to be an ANA member!

Greg

keyman64

Wow, very cool.



Linky Fixed.

GregL

Originally posted by: ProfHaroldHill
So... they've upped the ante.

The evil geniuses at ANA have been working overtime!

I dropped my ANA membership over 15 years ago, and figured I'd never go back.

This will be hard to resist.

Glad to hear the plan is working!

On top of this, look for special membership signup / renewal incentives coming soon in honor of our 125th anniversary!

Greg

illini420

More importantly, I have heard that it isn't just digital access of every issue of The Numismatist. That would have been easy to just scan them all in and post them.



Instead, all issues will be able to be searched which seems to be a much more labor-intensive undertaking. Will be great to be able to search a term and quickly see every time it ever showed up in the magazine! Can't wait to try it out.



I have just about every copy of The Numismatist going back to the 1920s and many older copies going back to about 1906... takes up a ton of space and is not easy at all to find things by actually flipping through all of those old issues!



I hope the ANA continues to digitize numismatic resources and make them available. Would be great for some of the old and rare books to be available like this too, at least start with the old stuff where the copyrights have expired.



Good work!

dbldie55

I cannot wait to check this out. Another great resource.

astrorat

Great ... it's hard to tell from the news release ... will the issue contents be searchable? So, for example, when one searches for "trade dollar," will all the context containing "trade dollar" be marked or just a subset of the context, such as titles?

I am glad that the Board has FINALLY supported this. It was pitched to them by staff as early as 2006, but fell on deaf ears.

keyman64

I wonder who the first people will be to read ALL of the issues, cover to cover...and then participate in an ANA sponsored trivia competition at a large ANA show based solely on those issues...with prizes yet to be named.



Your're welcome for the idea.

Coinosaurus

Thumbs up to the ANA. Probably decreases the value of my set but the digital access is well worth it, and it was inevitable they would all be scanned anyway.

DaveG

Greg,



Kudos to the ANA for putting The Numismatist online!





By the way, whatever happened to the B***** Index?



I remember it working a couple of years ago, but it doesn't seem to be operational anymore.

GregL

Bumping as the Archives are live today!

Please share know your thoughts!

winky

I am ANA member and now even better.

dbldie55

Enjoying them so far (since I really should be working and not digging into old issues of the numismatist). The android app works well too.

CaptHenway

Tried to register with the service and no luck. ANybody else register?

Dentuck

Okay, I've logged on and registered, and my quick first impression is. . . .



WOW!

CaptHenway

The host's user guide to doing searches:



http://blog.exacteditions.com/...-of-your-subscription/



Solved my registration problem. When you enter in your membership number in the poorly-named "subscription reference" field you have to leave off the alphabetical prefix such as LM- or R- or P-.



FWIW I did a test search of "Elder" and got 25 pages of results, about five of which were my article on Elder tokens. However, the results are scattered chronologically, which makes it hard to sift through them. I contacted the host and was told that the search engine arranges them according to relevancy. Since many of the hits were just Elder's name in an ad I don't know how it calculates that.



The PDF printouts of the pages are fabulous. Needed to get a copy of a specific article for a story I am doing and just printed it for reference.



However, when I tried printing out the OCR-read text only file just to see how it worked, I got a lot of gibberish because that particular article had illustrations set in the middle of two columns and the OCR reader combined the text of the cutline in with the adjacent text of the story, but only up to the place even with the right margin of the left-hand column. The rest of the cutline text got scrambled into the text from the right-hand column.



Also, where it read a subhead that read "Sovereign Fakes" it printed out "Overei n a es," ignoring the letters that went above or below the main type height.



Still a great tool!



TD

messydesk

Slow-clap for ANA. This is great!

OldIndianNutKase

Thanks for this great news Greg. I just discarded some of my old Numismatist magazines as I reasoned that finding the information I was looking for was too impractical. This is a very nice Christmas present for all of us.


OINK