Newspapers, magazines and club journals aren't the only publications issued on a periodical basis. The Newman Portal includes hundreds of periodical titles of many types on many subjects. To help make sense of the collection and ease browsing, NNP has category tags in the periodical section.

As a consultant to the Portal, one of my recent chores was to review and revamp these category tags. I took a look at the complete collection and attempted to define common-sense tags in multiple dimensions such as Geographic Scope (Local, State, Regional, World, etc.) Issuer Type (Organization, Dealer, Government etc) and Era (Ancient, Colonial, Civil War, etc).

The primary category is Publication Type. These include not only House Organ, Fixed Price List, Price Guide and Prices Paid For List, but also Counterfeit Detection and Cambist.

House Organs include Wayte Raymond's Coin Collector's Journal, The Elder Monthly  and Mehl's Coin Circular. Cambists are publications describing the metal content in circulating coins, which prior to 1857 in the U.S. included many, many foreign coins which circulated as legal tender. The cambists (often called "Coin Chart Manuals" were indispensible for merchants and today provide a window into the circulating coinage of the time.

Please have a look and test out the tags. Let us know what you think. It's also a great way to discover holes in the collection. You can't ask Google which numismatic house organs are in its index, but you can easily see that with NNP. What are we missing?

-Editor