ANA puts issues online

When I was in college back in the 1970s, I spent many hours paging through all of the back issues of Time magazine.

That meant over 50 years��� worth of news articles.

I did not read every word, of course, but I wanted to see how information was conveyed to readers as it happend.

I don’t even remember how long it took me to do this

It occurred over months.

At first it had been inspired by a search for a specific article in a specific issue that I needed for a project.

Naturally, I found the availability of the back issues distracting.

The American Numismatic Association hopes that something similar will seize the minds of its members.

A big project to digitize all of the back issues of The Numismatist has been completed.

There are issues going back to the first one in 1888.

That’s 127 years’ worth over 110,000 pages. All of this is available online.

The pages are reproduced just as they appeared originally.

I have spent time in the Krause Publications library looking at back issues in bound volumes.

Often, I would look at them to find obscure accounts of club meetings.

It is amazing how faithfully these events were recorded.

The ANA says that each archived page can be downloaded and printed, as well as bookmarked, cited and referenced by other registered users.

There are also links to other related articles.

It is probably a good thing that I have to work for a living, or you might find me spending my time looking at these back issues of The Numismatist as I once did with Time magazine.

Visit www.money.org for more information.

Buzz blogger Dave Harper has twice won the Numismatic Literary Guild Award for Best Blog and is editor of the weekly newspaper "Numismatic News."