NUMISMATIC LITERATURE ON HATHITRUST.ORG

Introduction
Are you having trouble finding obscure or out-of-print numismatic literature? HathiTrust.org has a digitized library of over 19 million items, including books, journals, and government publications. You can search anonymously or create a free account to organize your finds into customizable "collections." Filter items by type, date, language, author, subject, and more! You can download PDFs of relevant pages for offline viewing.

Search Using Keywords
A keyword search is the quickest way to find numismatic information, and you don't even have to login to do so! Broad search terms yield the greatest number of results. For example, if I search our organizational namesake word numismatic, the site produces 112,533 results. That is a lot of matches! Similarly, if I search the general term coin, I get an astonishing 2,342,540 results. Working with such a large number of results requires refinement of the search criteria. This can be done using the advanced search feature.

HathiTrust Search Bar

Filtering Search Results
Filters help to focus your search more closely upon the specific item you are looking for. Our previous search for coin, while broad, can still be narrowed down to a more manageable number of matches. The site prominently features seven filters: Subject, Author, Language, Place of Publication, Date of Publication, Original Format, and Original Location. Let's take a closer look at each of these.

The Subject filter contains several themes. A favorite of mine is periodicals. Applying this filter immediately condenses our number of matches to 67,706 items. A dramatic difference! Next, I filter by Author and select United States Congress which further focuses us down to 5,441 results. The Language and Place of Publication filters are not needed in this instance as all of the items were in English to begin with and were published within the United States. This leads me to the powerful Date of Publication filter. This filter has a two-step behavior in which I can first filter by decade, then filter again to each year within the decade. This is very handy for items that are published every year (e.g., Annual report of the Director of the Mint). Sticking with the entire 1870s decade brings us down to 3,867 results.

Two Original Format filters are available to choose from: Journal and Serial. The site says both contain 3,867 results – the same number that we just received after applying the previous filter – so selecting either one of these would be redundant. Lastly is the Origin Location filter. In this example, HathiTrust provides a list of seven universities with results as few as one and as many as 3,708. As we are often looking for a very specific item, selecting University of Michigan gives us a solitary result: Congressional Record: Proceedings and Debates of the Forty-Fourth Congress, volume 4, part 6, 1876. Now we are getting somewhere!

Congressional Record Document Found via Keyword Search

Examining an Item
Having found a specific item, what can I do with it? The About this Item field indicates that there are 1,040 page scans in this particular item. A substantive amount! There are six additional options to help get the most from this item: Download, Search in This Text, Jump to Section, Get This Item, Collections, and Share. Let's take a look at each of these.

Download allows a PDF file to be saved to your local computer for offline viewing. If you are affiliated with a member institution (e.g., Northeastern University) you can download an entire file in a single procedure. Otherwise you are limited to single page downloads. Search in This Text is a great way to look for instances of a particular keyword, like bronze. Ticking the Open Results in a New Tab box helps you to not get lost, especially within a large file. In the file we are working on, the word bronze appears three times, all near each other, on pages 68, 72, and 74. The pages are hyperlinked for easy access. When you click the link you are taken to the page and the keyword is highlighted in yellow. This helps when combing through information-dense pages, especially on government documents.

Highlighted Search Result for "Bronze" within a Document

Jump to Section is handy for general browsing as it helps you get to an area when you are not quite ready to go to a particular page just yet. Get This Item identifies places where you can access the item either digitally or physically. The Find in a Library link searches WorldCat.org to find the nearest location where a physical copy of the item can be found. For me, here in the Detroit area, my nearest location is at University of Detroit Mercy, School of Law. Over a thousand libraries are shown as having the item available worldwide. Not bad for 150-year-old government document!

Collections is where HathiTrust really shines as a numismatic research tool. Though you must login, it is a quick process to create an account, and it's free! Think of a collection as a bucket in which you place files according to themes that are meaningful to you. For the file we found above, I might create a collection called 19th Century Base-Metal Coins. As I find other related items, I add them to the collection for future review. Share is a great way to provide yourself or a collaborator with a Permanent Link to This Item or a Link to This Page Scan.

Conclusion
Over a quarter million new websites are created every day on the public internet. Finding the right numismatic information can be a slow and frustrating process. Using HathiTrust.org can shorten research timelines while yielding higher quality results.

About the Author
Dale Batko is a freelance writer based in Michigan. Several of his articles have appeared in over 32 magazines/newsletters/websites in 9 countries (Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, England, Germany, South Africa, Sweden, USA) on 6 continents over the last 30 years. He started collecting coins in 1978.

Online Sources:
https://www.hathitrust.org/
https://hdl.handle.net/2027/mdp.39015052104570 (Sample Search Document Above)

	NBS (coinbooks.org) Web