The world-famous Medallic Art Company announced today a new web site, www.medallic.com , designed to better display its 100+ years of minting excellence and to provide ready access for customers and art historians to numerous product categories, galleries, and historic slide presentations and custom minting information.

The new www.medallic.com is intuitive, which lets a site visitor navigate with ease, letting visitors examine Medallic Art Company’s custom medals, institutional chains and maces, stock and collectible medals, specialty items, lapel pins, and spinning medals and plaques. The ten new galleries feature outstanding creations of renowned sculptors such as James Earle Fraser (the Buffalo Nickel), Victor David Brenner (the Lincoln cent), and Augustus Saint-Gaudens (the ‘double eagle” coin). Since its creation, great artists have always been affiliated with Medallic Art Company.

The new website also provides a fascinating look at the entire minting process from concept to finished medallion, underscoring the complexity and artistry demanded of the sculptors, artists, die-makers, and production specialists in the creation of a fine work of art. Highlighted for visitors is the complete film, “The Medal Maker.” First shown to the Society of Medalists in 1929, it features multi-award winning coin and medal designer, sculptor Laura Gardin Fraser in her famous New York Studio in 1929 creating the models for the Special Medal of Honor for the National Sculpture Society, America’s highest sculptural award. Every step of creation and production is shown, including sketching, preparing background plate, transferring the drawing and applying clay pellets to the model, foundry casting of the pattern, die making and striking the medal at Medallic Art Company. This exceptional movie is narrated by Elizabeth Jones, sculptor, and former United States Mint Chief Engraver, from her studio in Philadelphia.

About Medallic Art Company

Medallic Art Company was formed in 1903 by Henry Weil, a highly respected French sculptor living in New York City. Through the years, the company has reproduced bas relief work of some of the most famous 20th century American sculptors, as well as many of the important medals and awards in the United States, including the Pulitzer Prize, Congressional Medal of Honor, National Medal of Science, President’s Medal for Freedom, the Newbery and Caldecott Medals, and the inaugural medals for 11 United States Presidents. (more…)

Professional Coin Grading Service (PCGS), a division of Collectors Universe, Inc. (NASADQ: CLCT), announces the unveiling of a completely new version of its popular web site, www.pcgs.com. With 3 million page views each month, PCGS.com is one of the most-visited web sites in the entire numismatic field.

The new site represents more than just a face lift. Its cleaner feel and more logical arrangement of links and information make navigation much easier than in the past. “It shouldn’t take regular visitors long to adjust to the new site,” said PCGS President Don Willis. “We’ve designed it to be less cluttered and more intuitive, making it easier for both frequent and newer visitors to find the information they’re looking for.”

With ease of use in mind, PCGS has eliminated the left-side menu and made the most frequently used pages accessible via the main menu bar at the top. The buttons link directly to PCGS Home, Services, Price Guide, Set Registry, PCGS CoinFacts, Resources, PCGS Store and About PCGS.

Underneath these choices, PCGS offers a weekly video and a Product Spotlight to highlight new products and services and provide a snapshot of “What’s New” at PCGS and in the coin industry.

Beneath these features, the user is given the opportunity to navigate by topic. For example, on the far left, new collectors are encouraged to Take the First Step. Under this heading, there are links to everything they need to get started in coin collecting: a New to Coins link takes them directly to the newly updated Start Here page, and links to vital information like why you should have your coins graded and how to obtain ballpark pricing from the PCGS Price Guide.

The last link in that group is to a new PCGS service that will make it immeasurably easier for new collectors to ascertain ballpark values for their coins. “We feel this could be one of the most useful tools ever developed for obtaining coin values,” Don Willis explained. “Once new collectors use CoinFacts to determine what they coin have, they can go to our Online Photograde^™ to at least get an approximate grade.” (more…)

CoinLink is always on the lookout for new sites related to numismatics, and especially ones that have the potencial to offer valuable new information to the collecting community. A recent article in the NGC Newsletter caught our eye. They profiled  Coin Society,  a new site which  just released an open beta at www.coinsociety.com.

Coin Society’s initial goal is to provide a transparent US Coin Price Guide built using an artificial intelligence engine framework that reads online coin transactions and classifies those transactions based on the standard catalog of  US coins.

Coin Society’s price guide is based on the final value of the last verifiable online transaction of any US coin by grading company and grade. Coin Society does not average prices or apply any algorithms to determine market price. Like the stock market, Coin Society’s prices are based solely on the last recorded transaction.

To find out a bit more about the site we contacted the founder David Simon, and asked him a few questions about himself, the web site and his goals:

Tell us a little about yourself, what you do for a living, etc.?

I’m the managing director of New London Associates www.nla.com, a software development firm in NYC. NLA works primarily in the financial services sector. I’m originally from Ohio and have lived in NYC for over 15 years. Married with a two year old daughter and another presently on the way.

I’m also the non-exec Chairman of SearchForce, Inc. http://www.searchforce.com which is a Search Engine Marketing management platform based in San Mateo, CA.

Prior to that, I was CTO of the Measurable Results group at JPMorganChase and was responsible for performance management across retail technology at the bank.

What is your numismatic background?

I’ve been deeply interested in the collectibles space for about 15 years and have been avidly collecting coins, sports cards and comic books for over 25 years. I started collecting coins when I was pretty young, my dad and grandfather got me into it, and by the time I was 19, I was buying NGC certified coins from Tom Noe at Vintage Coins around 1990. Over the years I’ve accumulated a pretty substantial coin collection.
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