John Kraljevich's observation that the first three Pogue catalogs would each have been a pound heavier if the riches revealed by the Newman Numismatic Portal had been available when they were being researched and written sparked an insight: Like Gaul, the history of numismatic research is divided into three parts.

The Pre-Internet Era
Starting from 1514, when Guillaume Bude wrote De Asse et Partibus Eius, numismatic researchers had to do it the hard way, castingtheir nets far and wide for sources, trekking from libraries, to private holdings, to archival repositories, and back to all again, searching forsources, sifting through possibilities,sorting the relevant from the irrelevant, sending letters hither and yon, and finally writing it all out inlonghand. The achievements of men like Sylvester Sage Crosby, C. Wyllys Betts, and William S. Baker while toiling under these disadvantages is amatter for wonderment.

The Internet Era
Starting in 1990 (for computer geeks only), or 1994 (with Yahoo! and Lycos), and September 4, 1998 (with Google), things got dramaticallybetter for the numismatic researcher, for search engines made it possible to reach previously-unimaginable sources of information, all without havingto travel or to subsidize the postal service.

Search engines were the great equalizer, making any of us feel like S.S. Crosby for a day when we found some important, but heretofore obscure fact in Mr. Google's haystack. That was the problem, though--it was a haystack, with millions of stalks returned to you for every search. There were needles of information hidden within, but who had the time (or fanaticism) to search through tens of thousands, much less millions, of completely pointless links? Nor was it possible that even Google had the algorithms necessary to find every pertinent numismatic fact.

The Newman Numismatic Portal Era
Starting March 10, 2016, another epoch opened in numismatic research. The Newman Numismatic Portal began providing content that had beenchosen, scanned, and aggregated to be relevant to specific numismatic searches. When fully built out, the NNP will offer Google's encyclopedicreach without Google's millions of irrelevant results. NNP will be what the numismatic researcher has always wanted, but never before had: anaccurate index to every numismatic publication, a reliable guide to all things on topic.

The NNP will reveal those facts of consequence and those seemingly of little moment, but, crucially, everything, every relevant thing, listed there for the researcher to ponder, decide, and to use. There will be more Crosbys and Bakers among us, because our tools have become infinitely better. A golden age of numismatic research and writing has begun, and we will date it to March 10, 2016 when the Portal first opened for us.

Future Eras

To visit the Newman Numismatic Portal, see:
http://www.newmanportal.org

To read the earlier E-Sylum article, see:
BUILDING THE D. BRENT POGUE COLLECTION (www.coinbooks.org/esylum_v19n16a05.html)