Searching in Numista

[Figleaf]

If you see a blue bar at the top of the page, select coins, banknotes or exonumia. You will find yourself looking at the search form. For modern coins, the fastest way to find is to start typing the name of the issuer (likely a country name) in the box that appears below the bar labelled All issuers. If a name appears twice, select the lowest. Add a date in the Search query... bar and click the search button.

For tokens, click exonumia and select a category. Select a country and prepare for some serious scrolling. There are other routes, e.g. if you want a list of the Dutch tokens in Numista, click exonumia and select Netherlands. Beware of spelling, unusual categories etc.

Please add your strategies or experience.

Peter

[FosseWay]

One issue I've come up against is spelling of currency names, especially plurals. 

For some currencies, the local plural is used (so 1 krona but 5 kronor for Sweden), whereas for others the standard English plural is used (ruble, rubles) while what's written on the coins is not only different from English but also different depending on more than just singular vs plural (Slavic languages and Arabic in particular). There are also issues with how you romanize text in other writing systems: is قرش to be searched as qirsh, ghirsh, ghersh, or even piastre?

I don't think there's a right or wrong way to do this. Being a linguistic purist is all very well, but many people want to look up coins that use languages they don't understand. Even if you do go down the linguistic purist route - I tend to write rubl', rublya, rublei for example because I know enough Russian to know what looks wrong - there are still several generally correct ways of writing the same Arabic, Hebrew, Russian etc. word. 

So I'd rather see a wider range of search terms yielding successful results. If I'm in the Egypt section and search for 1 qirsh, 1 ghirsh, 1 piastre ... the same results should come up.

I'd also like to see a standardization of "KM number" in Numista, so that the number used in KM is the "KM number", not Yeoman, Craig or whatever else. If it's listed with that number in KM, then it should be searchable using the string "KM# xxx" in Numista.

[quaziright]

If I'm looking for new coins added to the catalogue not yet marked in my wish list,
- change the coin type from All to Standard circulation
- put the date range in the Gregorian Calendar
- add the issuer else leave it blank if I'm doing a worldwide search
- check mark the not in my wish list box
- check mark not in my collection box

If I have to drill it down to let's say 2 euro, I type "2 euro" in the denomination field

As far as currency name is concerned, I'll usually have a quick read through the country section and see what kind of naming convention is followed. So I know for instance Numista has "2 euro" and not "2 euros". Similarly, if I can't remember off hand what the various currency names are in Egypt, I'll remove the filters, just go directly to Egypt, have a quick scroll through and once I've noted his the naming convention, I'll set up my filters accordingly

For certain countries like Germany or India with several subsections and potentially confusion, after having set all the filters required, I will choose the most generic name. So for instance, with India, if I'm looking for post independence coinage, I'll simply choose "India" and similarly for post Berlin Wall Germany I'll simply choose Germany. However if I'm looking for West Germany, then I will choose federal republic, because I'd quickly realise I'm pulling in east Germany coinage too once I start scrolling

Numista has certain improved its search function dramatically. I have never used search by picture or tag, but I've heardthose are similarly yield pretty accurate results