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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;Suarez, post: 4121762, member: 99239&quot;]To try to alleviate frustration...</p><p><br /></p><p><a href="https://www.coryssa.org/index.php" target="_blank" class="externalLink ProxyLink" data-proxy-href="https://www.coryssa.org/index.php" rel="nofollow">Coryssa</a> was started out of my own frustration back in 2007 when all we had for pro-level research was CoinArchives. As good as that database was (and I used it daily as did who knows how many other people) all you had to tame the beast was a search bar. While in many cases that&#039;s good enough in others I wasted far too much time separating signal from noise.</p><p><br /></p><p>The most extreme example of this was if you wanted to look up Nero asses. If I was clumsy enough to throw at it a &quot;nero as&quot; I&#039;d get flooded with practically the whole database. Leaving it to just &quot;nero&quot; would still return coins of Nero contaminated with way too many records of his ancestors. I think there were boolean operators that could be used as a crude filter but it was clearly not optimized for what I needed.</p><p><br /></p><p>Coryssa pulls an enormous amount of data. It hosts largely the same records as CoinArchives and ACS but also includes the last ten years of ebay, Wildwinds and several thousand hand-entered auctions from before the internet. It attempts to massage all this data by funneling it into pre-defined sections with relevant sub-sections in a similar way to how ebay works. While on ebay you could look for anything from the homepage navigating the different categories focuses your search and gives you more relevant results.</p><p><br /></p><p>There are many additional tools that allow you to find data waaaaaay more efficiently than you ever could with keyword searches alone. To use the initial example, you would find Nero&#039;s asses by selecting Roman Imperial (RI)</p><p>[ATTACH=full]1068339[/ATTACH]</p><p><br /></p><p>You can then go to All Coins at the top or begin narrowing your search to a specific subset as given on the available selling venues, each a subset of the top category</p><p>[ATTACH=full]1068340[/ATTACH]</p><p><br /></p><p>You are then presented with all of the rulers for RI</p><p><br /></p><p>[ATTACH=full]1068341[/ATTACH]</p><p><br /></p><p>Clicking this link brings you to a new page which now gives you additional filters and sorting modes. Clicking on the Denomination at left you should see a screen like this</p><p><br /></p><p>[ATTACH=full]1068344[/ATTACH]</p><p><br /></p><p>Now take a moment to consider what you have done. With just four clicks you have blown past 99.99% of the records that are irrelevant to your search. You could now begin your search bar query limiting the scope to just these records. However, you could keep going. Say I&#039;m looking for the most beautiful Temple of Janus. After having clicked on the As filter above you could then open up the Type field and select Temple</p><p><br /></p><p>[ATTACH=full]1068388[/ATTACH]</p><p><br /></p><p>Now that you have this selection going back to the top you could change the sorting order from the default showing the latest records to Price and you would get some spectacularly well-preserved coins</p><p>[ATTACH=full]1068360[/ATTACH]</p><p><br /></p><p>And that&#039;s just the start. You can play with filters for weight, date and prices in both forward and reverse orders. It gives you the ability to do things no other website can such as answering very specific questions like &quot;What&#039;s the heaviest coin of such and such sold in the last so many years?&quot; or &quot;What&#039;s the auctioneer with the highest average hammer price?&quot; or comparative type questions like &quot;Who&#039;s the rarest emperor?&quot; and &quot;What&#039;s the most common mint to issue xyz?&quot;. You can also simply browse what auction catalogs looked like a hundred years ago for the fun of it.</p><p><br /></p><p>Now for the downside. For the most part all the records in the database have been classified according to the text in the descriptions. A bot runs on a schedule looking for keywords which it then sticks where it thinks it belongs. Although it&#039;s gotten pretty sophisticated (the code runs several thousand lines) records can still wind up <i>hilariously </i>off track. As of this moment it falls to me and a part-time temp to correct the wayward records and manually classify those that the bot can&#039;t place. With some 1,000 records being added daily it&#039;s just impossible to keep up.</p><p><br /></p><p>So, if the above way of doing things doesn&#039;t get you the results you can of course resort to a simple Google-style search. Go back to the beginning, choose your civ and here&#039;s your low-tech starting point:</p><p><br /></p><p>[ATTACH=full]1068374[/ATTACH]</p><p><br /></p><p>A keyword here will look through the selected era&#039;s records. With no checkmark it will only search the record title and if you enter more than one term it will look for instances of all the matching keywords. I recommend you use the description box as searching only the titles is really only useful for ebay coins. Also, these searches can be very slow as the CPU gives these very low priority (nudging you to use the sections) and if you use multiple checkboxes it might eventually time out before you get the results.</p><p><br /></p><p>Another thing to consider is that this project started out as a way for me to begin work on my research which is almost 100% focused on Roman imperial and Byzantine. These two are therefore the most developed sections. Roman Republican and provincials are somewhat reliable and then from there it&#039;s downhill for lack of experience. You will probably be better off staying with keyword search in the Greek and Celtic/DarkAges areas as the sections are almost entirely curated by the bot scripts.</p><p><br /></p><p>If you have problems or something doesn&#039;t make sense or you want to help clean up let me know. You can also upload your own records.</p><p><br /></p><p>Rasiel[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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