I opened with a few slides giving an overview of the Newman Numismatic portal, including our founder Eric Newman's vision and the organization structure, includingWashington University in St. Louis, the Internet Archive, and consultants including myself and the software developers.

Audiences enjoy learning about the mechanics of digitization. I explained that despite numerous attempts no one has yet developed a robot that does a better job than humans atturning pages without mishaps. So the scanning of printed books and other materials is human-powered, with a librarian or student at the controls of a custom-built scanner with anangled cradle that takes high-resolution images of both left and right-hand pages simultaneously. Designed for the Internet Archive, it has integrated software that uploads imagesto the web where post-processing is done, including optical character recognition (OCR). Here's student Kevin Ha at work.

Next I reviewed the major content types - Books, Periodicals, Auction Catalogs, Images and Archival Material, illustrating each with a selection of images. Here are someselected periodicals.

While discussing periodicals I touched on one of the upcoming features we're working on. Now that there is so much material in the portal we want to provide more usefulways to organize and discover it. To better organize the periodical section, we're adding tags to classify them by type - commercial publications, club journals, dealer houseorgans, fixed price lists, etc. Here's some of the sausage-making in action - I'm adding a periodical type column to a spreadsheet.

Other new initiatives include the creation of image collections for the Newman colonial paper money collection, a new online edition of Newman's The Early Paper Money ofAmerican book, "Advanced Search" and "Power Search" features. Further out on the horizon are personalization features like favorites lists, usercollections and tagging, plus a numismatic web site archive.

We concluded with a question and answer session addressing both site content and user features, including desired search features.

Many thanks to John Frost of LSCC and the Barber Coin Collector's Society for lending us the projector and extension cord!

To see the complete presentation slide deck, see:
Newman Numismatic Portal Presentation (https://nnp.wustl.edu/library/book/556614)

To visit the Newman Numismatic Portal, see:
https://nnp.wustl.edu/