Numismatic and History Discussion Forums > Ancient Coin Forum

Some new online resources I'm building

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Steve Moulding:
Hi Kevin, great! Thanks for the feedback and I'm happy to hear it's useful for you.

The ANS has recently wrapped up an amazing job of digitizing an almost complete run of Glendining catalogs and posting them at archive.org (thank you Lara Jacobs).  I've added links to around 170 sales, many with plated ancients. 70 are in Spring's book.

Steve

Anaximander:
Hi, Steve. Thanks for your introduction. I’ve been referring to your “old” site listing of coin catalogs for a couple of years now. The new link you shared shows something wonderfully different.

Like you, in some ways, I've taken a big plunge into literature, but not so much catalogs as collections (yes, there’s some overlap). But when I need a catalog, I often struggle to locate it. I REALLY look forward to perusing your coin pedigree database, because that’s the large part of my desire to consult those old sale catalogs in the first place.

Those links to online catalog collections, like Gallica BnF, will be helpful. So many were largely unknown to me. Not for the first time, l’m learning about sites that I thought I knew….

Kudos!

Steve Moulding:
Hi Chris, thank you - really thank you - for that. 

For me, the whole catalog digitization, auction database and online link resources...it's useful, but is actually just several years of prelude to what I really want, which is the provenance database. That part is just getting off the ground. It's early stages, but with a few of the older sales entered (3500 lots or so), there's now enough to show people and get some feedback. Is it useful yet? Maybe, maybe not. With so few sales entered, you'd have to be really lucky to find a missing pedigree from a coin in hand today. But as more auctions get added the chances will get better. The direction is good. And it's still fun to play around.

I do discover missing pedigrees all the time between the coins already in the database. It's quite easy - visually - once the coins are weight-ordered. For example, many coins in Pozzi will show up again in another Naville sale soon after, but the Pozzi provenance is never mentioned. So I'll record those as well and so build up a record of where the coins have been seen...the Provenance Chains which are shown on the website. That's fun too. I think I have almost 80 new cases so far out of these 3500 records.

The bad news is how long it will take to build this database. For a single catalog with a couple hundred Italy/Sicily lots, it's at least a week of spare time work to do the image extraction from scans plus all the data entry. At that rate it's going to be 2-3 years to get up to the likely 25,000 or so records I think will constitute a reasonable Italy/Sicily database.

Gallica BnF, Heidelberg and archive are incredibly useful. I can't say it enough.  I keep looking for a similar resource that covers the Italian houses but so far little luck (gallica has a few Rattos).  Perhaps you know of one? 

Published collections I do buy and digitize as well (de Nanteuil, Locker Lampson, Lucien Hirsch etc), but mostly auction catalogs. Jameson I don't have, but it's online so I can refer to that for now. I've been recently getting into and buying the SNGs which I'd not paid much attention to, until recently. They are amazing sources of provenance information.

Well, thank you again Chris. Let's keep talking, and if you have feedback - good or bad - please let me know. I want those resources to get better.

Cheers,

Steve

Steve Moulding:
Hi Chris/Anaximander - so for fun I actually started checking some of your amazing gallery coins against the database over at rnumis.

I have to say your Lucania Metapontion Nomos looks an awful lot like Ars Classica V, Duplicates of the British Museum (1923), lot 469.
For example, look at the defect right of MA. Weights are very close too: 7.88g (Ars Classica V) vs 7.89g (yours). I saw the CNG 45 lot description doesn't mention any provenance.

https://www.rnumis.com/greek_coins_detail.php?dbid=ARS_19230618_469

What do you think?

Steve

ps I took the liberty of showing your coin here for comparison, hope that's ok. 

Kevin D:
Looks to me like you just added a great 99-year provenance to this coin. Nice!

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