The American Numismatic Society has launched a new blog, Pocket Change, to expand the organization's digital presence and provide a forum for the public to learn more about the Society's collection. To find it, please direct your browsers to this address: www.anspocketchange.org .

Pocket Change will feature contributions from the curatorial staff about their ongoing research, news and notes about visiting scholars, and regular posts on noteworthy objects and recent acquisitions. The blog will also give a periodic look to work behind the scenes at the ANS and everything that goes into caring for and managing our ever-expanding collection of coins and currency. We will also be highlighting new digital publications and online content from the library and archives as they become available. The overall focus will be on giving both members and the public a window into proceedings here, and to provide a digital forum for our educational efforts in the field of numismatics more generally.

Pocket Change will also allow us to feature content that is best suited to digital media. To that end, we are inaugurating a new monthly video series, which begins with a short film about the Fairbanks' Infallible Coin Scale. The first major digital project will be an ambitious examination of the numismatic dimensions of the Lewis and Clark Expedition using Historical GIS (a fancy term that essentially means plotting data onto digital historical maps). Beginning in May, there will be an ongoing series of blog posts that trace the route of the two-year expedition, and center on where and to whom the Indian Peace Medals that the company carried with them were distributed. The project promises to shed some new light on the role that the medals played in the context of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, and also to demonstrate how numismatists might begin to employ a range of new digital tools to their work.

One of the great appeals of a blog such as this is its flexibility. Exactly how Pocket Change develops will in part depend on its audience, and to that end we will feature a lot of interactive content. We have introduced a regular "Ask a Curator" column where we will answer reader questions about the ANS collection. A "Mysteries of the Vault" series highlights objects in the collection that we hope our knowledgeable readership can help us identify and learn more about. If you have ideas or questions about things you would like to see addressed on Pocket Change, please just use the "Contact" page on the website to let us know!