As we've found time over the last six months or so PPH and I have been developing an online Australian coin mintage tool. PPH has gone back to first principles to work out the mintages for Australian decimal coins. This means looking at original RAM reports, the RAM website, and old ACR/CAB magazines. Renniks and Macca's are not being used as sources at all. It's been a boatload of work for her and she's done up to the 20c coins so far.
I've been working on the database backend of the tool, the scripting, and the images. And I plug in the data that PPH generates when I get to spend the time. I've spent the last day working on it and tweaking it up and now we think it's ready for more people to look at, poke around, and let us know what they think about it.
So, here it is:
Australian Decimal Coin Mintages Online (http://www.australian-threepence.com/australian-coin-mintages/)
Some interesting things you can do with this tool:
1. Type a year, mint, or denomination into the search box and quickly drill down to a particular mintage.
2. View all mintages for a denomination by visiting a denomination page.
3. View all coins minted in a year by clicking on a year in the "Australian Decimal Coin Mintages By Year" table.
4. All mintage tables (for example this one (http://www.australian-threepence.com/australian-coin-mintages/type/13/1966-1984-standard-20-cent/)) display 25 rows of data by default. You can see more by selecting a different value from the "Show Entries" dropdown.
5. All mintage tables show the total mintage for that particular table even if you're not displaying all rows.
6. You can sort any mintage table by clicking on the column headers. For example, if you want to sort by mintage in a table click on the "Mintage" column header.
What's Next?
We want to get the kinks ironed out of the system and add new features that seem like great ideas (graphs anyone?). Then, obviously we want to finish off the mintages and provide an image for each and every decimal coin minted. I am sure PPH would love to hear from anyone who has input on the mintages. Along with source information of course. She's done so much work on this and has the source for each and every mintage number comprehensively documented. So if you're going to tell her she's wrong about something then you better have back up information! I know there's one or two people here working on mintages so please let us know if you find any problems with her numbers.
Long term (very long term) we'd want to do all this work for pre-decimal coins. Of course that's a tonne of work and the information sources are very poor.
Fantastic project guys- congratulations to you both.!!
Looks great Mark. Lovely work by both of you.
Congratulations!!! This is a huge undertaking and it will serve as a significant resource for all interested collectors.
The format is easy to use and navigating through the various denominations and mintage types was straight forward.
Only one thing I noticed and it is minuscule in scheme of the project is the images aren't appearing uniformly.
- 1c images appear correctly.
- 2c is missing Maklouf
- 5c is missing Rank-Broadley
- 10c is missing Rank-Broadley
The images are not present in the Summary page or the Detail pages.
I love the mintage by year selection. This is a very handy tool.
My favourite piece of functionality is the ability to sort mintages by column definitions. Very cool.
Can I ask why Renniks or Macca's weren't used (at least as a validating resource) for the determination of the mintages?
Looking forward to the next installment.
Good work!
Just one thing, I've been doing pretty much the same thing, and have learned you can't trust the RAM reports entirely, and the RAM website at all. There are rounding errors, incomplete entries, and plain old mistakes in them.
Since the catalogues have been produced after similar research, why ignore them?
Fantastic resource. Keep up the good work. I'm looking forward to seeing the 50s!
monster effort guys!!
well done!! :wavemulticolor:
Quote from: 'coxspau' pid='21641' dateline='1373937537'Can I ask why Renniks or Macca's weren't used (at least as a validating resource) for the determination of the mintages?
I don't know their reasoning but I've seen discussion about the validity of some of the figures in the price guides, and I think there are a few mintages that have been amended in the guides over the years (so they were either wrong at one point or are wrong now).
We'd like this guide/tool be independent of existing numbers and have backup source data that's reliable.
Coxspau those images haven't been added yet as we didn't have a big enough image available at the time. I have dug out some coins for Mark to photograph when he gets the chance to add them.
He's had his head in the backend of this tool :blush: for 2 whole days now after I finished the 20c data a little while ago after a hard slog. He should have been doing his real job!
All the data is in a spreadsheet so it's very simple to adjust data and add new things (like proofs :dodgy:)
It takes so much time to get into the headspace for working on this and a spare half hour here and there doesn't cut it. I'll need to go crawl into a hole for 2 weeks straight to get the 50c started and complete!
p.s The Lifesaver 20c in the PNC doesn't have a mintage!! It's not in the RAM reports it's fallen off the face of the earth! Anyone shed any light?
Hi PPH,
I can't imagine how much time and commitment is required to pull this together. I think you are both brilliant for doing this. My comment was merely an observation. Sometimes the forest can't be seen because of all the trees.
Again, well done.
We appreciate you guys pottering around with it and pointing out any problems whether problems whoops or problems getting around to it :)
Post anything at all here.
Just looking at the numbers for 1ยข, I see discrepancies with what I already had of a few thousand here and there, up to 10,000 for Canb 1966. Then a few glaring mistakes on the RAM website, like 1985 and 1990. Apart from their rounding to the nearest 100k, wouldn't these errors destroy any credibility they might have had?
I do understand the work that goes into a project like this, and I think its badly needed. I just hope all the data is actually available to complete it.
Great resource PPH,
What about the 2010 Heritage set mintage for the 1c and 2c coins? (and the other denominations)
Cheers
Peter (notcb)
Great work PPH and Markn - a super resource! :good:
Pedro