A New Numismatic Portal at the Libraries
The new Newman Numismatic Portal, launched in September 2026, brings together the literature and images of numismatics into a unified repository. The study of numismatics focuses on coins, paper money, medals, tokens, and related objects. The Newman Portal site currently hosts over 96,000 documents and 155,000 images. Content is acquired through digitization as well as the aggregation of material that is increasingly born-digital. Users include both researchers and collectors and the site is especially strong in U.S. National Archives material related to the U.S. Mint.
This project is administered by Olin Library and is sponsored by the Eric P. Newman Numismatic Education Society (EPNNES). EPNNES was founded by Eric P. Newman in 1958 and has supported a variety of causes related to numismatic education, including the American Numismatic Society Graduate Seminar. Newman, a 1935 graduate of Washington University law school, was a lifelong St. Louisan who published widely on early U.S. colonial coins and paper money, counterfeit detection, and Missouri numismatics. Newman’s collection was dispersed at auction in a series of sales beginning in 2013, with 100 percent of the proceeds allocated toward the Newman Portal and other philanthropic causes.
The Newman Portal first went live in early 2016 using a proprietary software platform. Over time the needs of the site have outgrown the initial architecture, and a migration to the new digital collections platform is part of a broader effort within Special Collections to consolidate portions of their digital archives onto a single site. The new home of NNP offers expanded flexibility to add additional collections and support new metadata schema.
Overall, this migration provides a more sustainable technical foundation for the Newman Portal while preserving the specialized content developed over the past decade. Just as importantly, bringing the Newman Portal into a shared library infrastructure positions the project to benefit from future enhancements in discovery, digital preservation, and collection management. The transition represents the next stage in Newman Portal’s development, ensuring that this significant numismatic resource remains accessible and adaptable for researchers and collectors well into the future.