By Rasiel Suarez – Coinvac.com….
Ancient coin website Coinvac.com is happy to celebrate the entry of its 100th pre-Internet auction sale. Totaling over 35,000 individual lots, the effort was accomplished over several months of painstaking scanning and parsing of old auction catalogues. These were then reconstructed joining each lot’s text description to their corresponding plate images, tagged according to period, weight, etc. then finally uploaded one at a time.
Among the dozens of auctions now archived are found some of the most legendary sales ever held including the Samuel Pozzi collection dispersed in 1921 by Naville Ars Classica, Montagu by Sotheby’s in 1897, the Walter Niggeler collection by Bank Leu in the mid-sixties, Imhoof-Blumer by Adolph Hess and Jacob Hirsch in the early 1900s and the best of the run of printed auctions carried by the notoriously doomed firm Numismatic Fine Arts.
The full list is published at http://coinvac.com/AuctionsList.html. [You can register as a new user for free, or sign in with Google and Facebook. — CoinWeek]
Coinvac’s 1.7 million records are extensively categorized providing easy access to large data sets at the click of a button across many different groupings. Together with an array of sophisticated tools and a user-friendly interface the sum effect greatly lessens the need for researchers to rely on keyword searches alone or having to sift aimlessly through countless records as is often the case.
The online community is fortunate to enjoy strong growth in the quality and quantity of sites devoted to ancient numismatics and in particular to the ever-widening list of projects involved in digital archiving. By directing increased resources into making readily accessible the absolutely massive amount of coin sales data from the late 1800’s through the whole of the 20th century, Coinvac opens a needed front in a time where virtual repositories house increasingly overlapping information gleaned from the same data streams. It is the expectation that if the current pace of growth can be maintained the site will be able to claim within a few months a fully comprehensive record of the trove of sales of all major auctioneers from the dawn of the illustrated catalogues in the 1880’s through to the present day.
Interested parties are encouraged to contact site owner Rasiel Suarez at [email protected].
