CoinArchives.com is a repository for coin auction catalogs in the digital domain. Its goal is to make entire auction catalogs, including textual lot descriptions, images, and prices realized, available to Internet users after each auction's completion.

The focus of the site is on catalogs issued by some of the most prestigious coin firms in the world. As such, coins from these sales tend to be of high quality, value, and collector interest. CoinArchives.com might not be the best place for researching very common or low cost coins.

In the last few years, most of the major coin auction firms have posted online versions of their catalogs. These online catalogs usually offer the same high quality photos and lot descriptions as their paper counterparts. Typically, after each auction, coin firms remove their auction data from the Web. The goal of CoinArchives.com is to prevent the loss of this valuable digital information by preserving and storing it for future use.

I'm A.J. Gatlin, an IT consultant and ancient coin collector. I designed CoinArchives.com as a source for coin price information to guide me when bidding in (mostly European) auctions. I made the site publically available on October 5, 2002, so anyone interested in ancient coins can access the data I've collected. I expanded the site in November of 2003 by adding a new World Coins database that contains non-ancient coins produced from medieval to modern times.

Yes, several! See the Search Tips page. The CoinArchives.com search engine isn't hard to use, but it is strict. Individual terms separated by and or not usually work best (rather than phrases). Be careful when choosing your search terms, and remember that most of the database content isn't in English. See the section called "The Language Barrier" on the Search Tips page.

Maybe. Keep in mind, though, that I'm not a coin attribution/valuation service. I don't have the experience necessary to identify every type of coin. However, I might be able to help if you can send me a good image of the coin. If you need detailed research or require an authoritative source, you might try David Sear's Ancient Coin Certification Service or contact one of CoinArchives.com's contributing firms.

You need at least some concrete information about your coin to use CoinArchives.com. Try to read any words that might be written on your coin, and type them into the search engine separated by the and operator.

No. I'm not a coin dealer, nor do I act as a broker. If you're interested in selling a coin, try contacting a coin firm directly. I've put links to many reputable firms on the CoinArchives.com home page.

A certain auction must meet several requirements before I can archive it. The auction must be of high quality and issued by a reputable firm. It has to be available in an electronic format that I can process and import. I also must have permission from the firm that produced the auction (for copyright reasons).

Online auction catalogs are a relatively new thing in the world of numismatics. Although I'd love to include every auction issued by all major firms, much of this information simply isn't available in an electronic format (and never was).

For now, no. The work required to digitize old auction catalogs (i.e., scanning lot descriptions and images) is far more than I can handle. In the distant future, this might become possible, but I'm not seriously considering it anytime soon.

I'd like to include as many auctions as possible. But I don't know every coin firm. If you would like to suggest a firm that I should consider, please contact me. Keep in mind, though, that technical reasons occasionally prevent me from including certain auctions.

The three-letter abbreviation stands for a currency:

• USD = United States Dollar
• EUR = Euro
• DEM = Deutsche Mark
• CHF = Swiss Franc
• FRF = French Franc
• GBP = Great Britain Pound

A good site for currency conversion is www.xe.com.

The vast majority of lot descriptions in CoinArchives.com are written by experts and checked for accuracy before publication. However, errors do inevitably occur. To preserve the integrity of the CoinArchives database, I've decided not to correct any original lot descriptions. Why? Because I want to preserve a true archive of the material the auction firms produce. But don't let that stop you from sending in a correction! I may create a separate table in the future that will contain user-submitted corrections.

No. Prices realized are just the hammer prices achieved at an auction. As such, they don't reflect any post-sale fees. Most firms charge a buyer's fee, which can be a considerable cost to keep in mind when bidding in auctions. Currently, the buyer's fee in many auctions is 15% of the hammer price, but this number can change and differs among auction houses. Also keep in mind that firms typically add bank, credit card, shipping, and insurance fees to your invoice. Check each firm's Web site and carefully read their conditions of sale before bidding.

I don't own the copyright for any of the material in the CoinArchives database, so I don't have the authority to let you use it. You need to contact the firm that originally produced the material and ask them for permission. Most firms are more than happy to allow the use of their material for non-commercial purposes.

The search engine tries to match a user's query with text in coin lot descriptions (as taken from online catalogs). The engine currently supports two Boolean operators: AND, which matches more than one term; and NOT, which lets you filter out unwanted material with one or more terms. Individual words or phrases, when separated by Boolean operators, are treated as discrete search items. Spaces between terms are interpreted literally, so a phrase search will be successful only if it matches exactly. In addition, the search engine supports a very simple form of stemming, which allows the original search items (single terms or phrases) to expand to match text in a lot description.