Harry Bass' Last Gifts to the Numismatic World

Harry Bass' Last Gifts to the Numismatic World

Beyond his own collecting interests, Harry Bass was interested in sharing the world of numismatics and his love for numismatics with a much broader audience - all those whom he would never meet who circled the globe.

A couple of years before his death in the spring of 1998, he and his assistant, Ed Deane completed his initial computerized database project, NIP. Named the Numismatic Indexes Project (NIP), Mr. Bass brought together the major American periodicals to be electronically indexed, so that anyone anywhere around the world would for the first time have access to this information. Up until this time (1996), indexes of the respective numismatic periodicals had only been occasionally published by the owners of the journals themselves. One had to have a paper copy of each index, and then access to the articles to which they referred. While Mr. Bass could not have copyright access to the articles themselves, he was granted by the respective publishers access to organize and re-publish the information found in their indexes. This set him on a grand project - to build an Internet version of this information in a database that would be quickly electronically searchable. A numismatist, whether collector, dealer or researcher, could find what had been written in the last 110 years about any given subject that had been published on the American scene. The seeker would not the content of the article, but he would know what had been researched and written up prior to his own inquiry.

When NIP went online on the Internet, Mr. Bass received grateful responses from numismatists around the world. So he was encouraged to think what other numismatic areas could also be 'captured' and shared with interested persons worldwide. Since he was a past-president of the American Numismatic Society in New York City, and had continued to serve as an advisor to them in the succeeding years, he immediately thought of two major areas of numismatic knowledge to explore: (1) the ANS publication (since 1946) twice each year of Numismatic Literature, which receives and publishes numismatic abstracts of publications from all over the world (and in a number of different languages); and (2) the vast library resources of the ANS itself, housed at their headquarters in New York City. For many years Mr. Bass had both been a user of, and a monetary contributor to, the ANS Library, which is likely the largest numismatic storehouse of knowledge in the world. For a number of years he had annually conferred with the ANS Librarian, Frank Campbell, deciding what treasures to buy that year from the numismatic literature auction sales.

Although suffering from a lung illness that was getting progressively worse, and would finally claim his life, Mr. Bass was urgently pressing forward to computerize both of these areas, the full contents of the last fifty years of Numismatic Literature, as well as creating for the first time a full electronic index of the complete holdings of the ANS Library.

Ed Deane took responsibility for the completion of the Numismatic Literature (NumLit) project, which involves scanning in each page of each edition of NumLit, and correcting any scan-errors (whatever the language), and then building and massaging that information into a complete database record (adding the needed fields for a complete lookup). To date, all but about 10 years of NumLit has been completed, and the remainder should be finished by the end of 2001. This will allow numismatists to search on the Internet back to the end of World War II for numismatic references (most with English abstracts) to the interests of their choice. Again, it will not give them the full articles, but will point them to what research has already been done, so they can begin a search to locate it in numismatic libraries around the world. NumLit can be searched at the ANS site: www.amnumsoc.org/search/ (Note there are 4 search areas there: their own coin database; Library Search, NumLit search; and Keyword Search. Each accesses different databases. Also note, here is a link to the background of the NumLit project that formerly was available on the HBRF site.)

The second project, the creation of an electronic index of the ANS Library was handled by Skip Hill, a Dallas computer consultant to Mr. Bass for many years. It meant taking each of the existing paper library cards at the ANS, and re-working the information into a librarian's format for twenty-first century use, not only in the ANS building itself, but on the Internet. For numismatists, it would be like the contents of the Library of Congress being online for the first time. A professional firm that does such library conversions had to be contracted with, a system of supplying them (in stages) with each of the trays of library cards which were in turn hand-entered into the computers for the creation of such a database of information. It took a number of months to process the 120,000 card entries, as well as a significant personal financial investment by Mr. Bass to bring this electronic catalog into existence for the benefit of the ANS and numismatists. It was in the final stages of completion when he died in the spring of 1998; only hours before he died, he was asking about a current update as to its progress. Having been completed later that year, it is now available to the numismatic world through the ANS site, www.amnumsoc.org/search/

Many numismatists are familiar with the fact that initially Mr. Bass maintained his own website, www.hbrf.org, with the server in his home. As long as he was physically able, he continued to work on his numismatic projects, answer emails, and pursue the perfection of his US federal gold collection until just weeks before his death. During those earlier days of the Internet, he developed an Internet presence for the ANS, which he hosted on his site, as well as posting the listing of their object collections on the Internet. Thus for the first time ever, numismatists anywhere could search the contents of the different cabinets of the ANS to find what/whether certain coins from around the world were a part of the ANS collection. This was the culmination of one of Harry Bass' dreams for the ANS - to be able to share their numismatic information with numismatists everywhere, rather than their having to physically visit New York City to examine their numismatic resources. With the completion of these other parts of database-building, his dream will be fulfilled, serving both now and into the future.