What’s New in NumisMaster: May 2023

During the four weeks since our last installment roughly 1,500 new master records, each describing a single commemorative or circulating coin, have been added to NumisMaster. These new types were spread out over 35 countries and included base metal circulation types, as well as various commemorative and bullion coins struck in silver, gold and platinum.

Some of the countries with the most additions include: Ghana, with over 180 new types, many of which you might already be seeing for sale on eBay, Belarus, with over 120 new types, Canada with over 60 new circulation and commemorative coins available on the RCM website right now, Djibouti with over 40 new commemoratives, Gabon and Gambia, with a combined total of over 230 new coins and France with 35 additions covering the year of the Rabbit and more commemoratives in the 2024 Paris Olympic series. That’s a lot of coinage to explore!

Of course not every addition involves a new master record. For circulating and bullion types many new dates and mintmark distinctions are added throughout the year. In Hungary, 95 new dates or detail lines as we call them, were added last month and most recently over 150 new detail lines were added to German circulating type coins. All together there were more than 480 detail lines representing new dates and mintmark combinations added since our last installment of this column.

Another facet of our work involves gathering, processing and importing new images. While most of these will be images representing new master records, some may be added for illustrating new dates on existing bullion and circulation types. When we devised our original NumisMaster system we allowed for illustrations to be attached to each date of every master record or type coin. Our intention in doing that was to provide images for those who wanted to pursue the study of die varieties by date.

In all just over 900 new images were added this past month primarily to the countries we have mentioned above. However, I should note that over 60 images were added to Cook Islands, nearly 30 were added to the People’s Republic of China, 52 images were tacked onto Chad and a combined 55 were added for British Antarctic Territories, Croatia, United States, Finland, Equatorial Guinea and the Congo Republic.