A new database

[rasiel]

as many of you may know, i've been working the past few years on a complete rewrite of my first book ERIC. one of the main criticisms against the first edition was that it had no rarity or pricing information. many disagreed that that information belonged in a reference book, me included (sort of) but the fact that many others did want it got me thinking on whether i could integrate the request without it being intrusive and also resorting to just copying other reference's notoriously unreliable data.

after exploring a couple of options i decided the only way to do the job properly was to build a database with data from real market transactions. a primary challenge in this endeavor was determining actual market rarity and pricing because different venues target different types of collectors. just as you don't expect to look for aurei on ebay you don't shop for common late roman bronzes in a european coin auction. to "harmonize" this data i came up with a scheme that takes both ends into account.

so over the past year i've been seeding a new site with auction data for this purpose. as with tantalus there are a number of bugs still left to clear and new features still in the pipeline. the thing pretty much runs itself and i spent months finetuning the crawling routines to do a decent job of parsing auction data automatically into the right place. although the original intent was to have this be my private depot i know a number of you can always use a new research channel. in this particular case the highlight would be a near full year of archived ebay auctions with only a couple weeks in march missing. this is only for roman imperial coins, at least so far, but does also include closed auctions from several top firms. although fixed price data will not be used in the book data tally it also archives several thousand old vcoins sales and all wildwinds in the familiar dirty old coins "dashboard" with each emperor getting its own link and sub-page.

the website is http://www.coinvac.com and you can test it out with my login name rasiel and password eric2. if you find it useful and can bring yourself to consider a subscription, hey, mucho appreciated :-)

ras

[Joe-K]

Hi:
You might want to correct the link.... you have a comma instead of a period at the beginning.

I looked and I think it very interesting.... not sure if I am understanding but I do like the site.

I did not find anything about subscription.... unless I missed it.

Joe-K

[rasiel]

oops, thanks - just fixed