E-SYLUM ARTICLE SEQUENCE NUMBERS

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V19 2016 INDEX E-SYLUM ARCHIVE

The E-Sylum: Volume 19, Number 9, February 28, 2016, Article 14

Dick Johnson submitted these thoughts on organizing and referencing E-Sylum article. Thanks. -Editor

While it would be difficult to improve on The E-Sylum, I do have a suggestion.

My first thought would be to number each article each week in your table of contents instead of the bullet points. This would aid finding it when a reference is made to it later.

Then I realized you have all existing articles sequentially numbered in the Complete Table of Contents. Could you assign this sequence number in each issue as published? This could appear instead of – or in addition to – the bullet point for each article. This would aid searching for a previous article as I do constantly.

Then citations would be for example: 13942, Oct 2014 instead of the unwieldy Volume Number, Issue Number, Article Number. Including the date is important, as it gives meaning to when it was published (absent in the present system).

There is precedence for this. Index 19th Century American Art Periodicals by Mary Martin Schmidt, where every article is so serially numbered.

I do a lot of referring back to previous E-Sylum articles. This method would be far more convenient.

Great question. Well, as Dick noted we do have article sequence numbers on the “Complete Table of Contents” page on the NBS web site, as shown above: http://www.coinbooks.org/esylum_toc.html

The first column is the article sequence number. The last article in our last issue (Volume 19, Number 8, Article 38) is consecutive article number 20,474.

I suppose we could experiment with article numbers rather than bullets in the table of contents packages with the weekly email, but I don’t think that would look as nice. Since the numbers are available on the archive I’m not inclined to include them in the emailed issue as well. -Editor