Rare Book Monthly
AE: An Update with Destiny
An easier site to use
By Bruce McKinney
Over the past seven years AE has evolved. It was first a database of 151,000 historical records and a nascent online publication about books. It began in 2002 by covering printed Americana in auctions prospectively and expanded into complete coverage of books, manuscripts and ephemera in 2004. It added extensive collector tools via Matchmaker the same year and Footnotes, documentation software, in 2005. In 2007 it added Books for Sale and in 2008 Wiki Bibliographies. This month we introduce a reorganization and simplification of the site into seven sections that replace the jury-rigged one-more-one-more approach of listing new services under an ever-longer list of services. Enough already!
The new site is divided into seven parts, all linked slices of the new pie chart, which is both on the AE home page and always accessible via the round HOME link on all AE pages. The seven pie-chart segments are:
Books for Sale
Search Upcoming Auction Lots
AE Monthly
Wiki Bibliographies
AE Database
AE Premium Services
Other...
Each of these sections aggregate all related pages. So for instance, in Search Upcoming Auction Lots there is
The Worldwide Search of Upcoming Auctions Lots,
List of Auction Houses covered,
2008 Charts and Analyses [membership required]
The Current Auction Calendar with links to previous, next and Click here for Complete Listings [a full size calendar]
AE Monthly is another pie chart segment:
The current issue of AE Monthly,
Across the AEM header there are links to Articles, Reviews, Advertising, Archives and Letters to the Editor. In the archives there are over 1,400 articles to search.
