What type of nline information do you could have access to?
Scanning old magazines and articles or Seeing old auction catalogs?

The sticking point with the Polls software is that it forces one choice. Finding U.S. coin prices online is pretty easy. World and ancients are not that hard, but not so easy. The toss-up for me was among the ANA, ANS and old reference books.

Old auction catalogs online are something like old cars online. You can look at the pictures, but something is missing from the experience.

Since I can only vote for one, I selected the reference books. Out of print would be terrific, but I'd opt for a bunch of the current books as well. Online is easier on the brain for searching. It's much easier to search across a significant body of works for information in an electronic venue.

I'd like to see all of them available.

Difficult question indeed; it would be a dream if all of them could be found online like an online library. You can't possibly buy every single copy of numismatic books, or rather locating a particularly rare one could be pretty difficult.

I chose out of print reference books.

Yes, the choices are tough. Perhaps Google will find some of the truly rare books and reprint them. I like auction catalogs for certain purposes, but a lot of the common stuff does get repetative. The ANS journals intrigue me, especially the works of E.G.Caley. Actually, all but one of his works on metrology of ancient coins should be in the public domain.

The good news is that we are going to be able to access ever more information more easily and quickly than ever before.

It's not part of this poll, but I'd be more than willing to pay an annual membership/subscription fee for electronic access to such materials.

My thinking was right along the same lines with Michael.

I voted for Out of Print Reference Books, the close second is "Price Guides Other", which I assume means a KM-like world coin catalog.

I too would have to go with the out of print reference books, simply because they can be very hard to acquire. Although not my field of interest in any respects there's been some discussion on the predecimal forum about the difficulty of acquiring the Peck book on copper and bronze coinage. Went out of print some years ago and are now very difficult to source. Being that it's one of the few specialist works in the UK scene (as we don't go in for writing specialist guides per denomination or type, only the sovereign gets that disctinction), the Peck book is the authoritative work on copper and base metal coinage and their varities.

Gouby's book on the bronze coinage is even more indepth but is also tough to source, i don't know whether this is still in print or not. A copperhead could only tell you that much.

I went for old journals - ANS. But I'd want it to be searchable. I have managed to find enough "book only" search engines that I can find most of the books I want. Some have taken a while and been quite expensive, but I managed to find them.

What I have the hardest time finding is specific information about specific, little known coins. But if I can manage to find out by queries that such and such an article was written back when - then at least I know what to start asking people about and if they can send me a copy of it.

I agree and that is the reason that I rely on libraries. When researching a recent article on "Copper Owls" one of the references referenced an article from the Nickel Arts Conference in 1984. The Michigan State University Library had a copy of the proceedings, but it was not easy finding it anywhere else.

ANS Museum Notes would be a great start, but it would be only the start.

Referance books!, Knowledge is key!!!!!

For some areas of my current collecting interests there are no decent reference books. What you have to work with are key auction catalogues or key fixed price lists. That's why I can't quite agree with Michaels Take on auction catalogues, but I can see his point if I were to take a `generalist' perspective. That is, IF there was something better available.

Ian

I had forgotten about that aspect of old catalogues. For the arcane topics, the catalogs are often the best or only source of information. (Magazine articles are a strong second.) The Breen Encyclopedia was written almost entirely from auction catalogs and nothing like it exists in most other areas. Even the Sear books on Greeks and Romans come primarily from the British Museum sylloges with some addition collection catalogs. Yet, auctions such as the Pozzi Collection, are still considered primary source materials. More worrisome are the many small auctions and mail order sellers whose catalogs and lists are known only to the few, such as Ian.