ANS LIBRARY 2013 ANNUAL REPORT

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V16 2013 INDEX E-SYLUM ARCHIVE

The E-Sylum: Volume 16, Number 43, October 20, 2013, Article 11

Elizabeth Hahn, Librarian of the American Numismatic Society, has posted a summary of her report from yesterday's ANS annual meeting. Here are some excerpts, but reading the complete version online is a must for bibliophiles and researchers. They've had a very busy year and made great progress in many areas. -Editor

The library continues to have a healthy stream of visitors working their way through the collections; from local members and residents to scholars from all over the world. Reference requests still remain one of our top activities, and as in previous years, the majority come through via email (from all over the world).

I would like to start by thanking a handful of individuals who stepped up this fiscal year to help with the library cataloger fund, including: Dan Hamelberg, the Numismatic Bibliomania Society, Sydney Martin, Larry Schwimmer, William A. Burd, Len Augsburger, Tom Harrison, and John P. Huffman. As a result of this, coupled with the donations from last year, we were able to hire a new full-time library cataloger, Katie Rissetto. She has been excellent – efficient, quick, curious, and good-humored, and she has adapted quickly to working at the ANS.

We do still need to raise funds to keep this position going so I hope we will be able to meet our goal again this year. We also had significant contributions to the library funds from John W. Adams, Rick Witschonke, George Kolbe, David Fanning, Joseph Foster, and David Andreas. We also have the honor of adding another name to our wall of library donors. This year, we honor the Numismatic Bibliomania Society!

We received nearly a THOUSAND auction catalogs in response to posting and circulating our lists of “missing” catalogs over the last year. We are particularly grateful to the following individuals for their outstanding support in this area: Rick Witschonke, Normand Pepin, John Keeberg, Rachel Lyubovitzky, Danil Fishteyn, Jere Bacharach, and Heritage and the Teich Family, who were all responsible for the largest groupings of these catalog donations. A significant number of book and catalog donations also came in from: Jonathan Wohl, Mark Tomasko, Tim Welo, Ray Williams, William A. Burd, and so many more; many of these came in from items I had listed on the ‘wish list’ portion of the library. We also received more than double the amount of book donations compared to last year (376 this year compared to 185 last year!). These numbers also do not reflect the numerous pamphlet file and offprint donations. So all told, it was an excellent year for the growth of the library collections.

n June 2013, we received an Archive grant to start digitization in ARCHER, from the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation. The project will digitize pages from the notebooks of Edward T. Newell and will fund the staff needed to catalog the material at document level and prepare it for display in ARCHER (the online database of the ANS Archives). We have selected an initial sample of 3,000 pages, which have been chosen based on their variety of content and will allow us to test multiple levels and functions of the cataloging. Again, this project is currently underway and I look forward to reporting on it in more detail in the coming year.

To read the complete report, see: FY 2013 Annual Report (numismatics.org/FY2013/Library)

We had a great ANS annual meeting Saturday and there were a number of NBS members in attendance. We honored the NBS support with a plaque in the library reading room and I'm attaching here a photo of me and NBS past president Dan Freidus. It was hard to really see the donor plaques in the photos because of the white wall, but we are standing on either side of the NBS plaque.