Rome Wasn't Digitized in a Day - Council on Library and Information ...

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must consider commercial and enthusiast websites as they often provide the most <strong>in</strong>formation onl<strong>in</strong>e
regard<strong>in</strong>g co<strong>in</strong>s, and he also asserted that some commercial enterprises were more open with their data
than academic ones. In addition, Heath’s brief <strong>in</strong>formal survey of the f<strong>in</strong>dability of academic
numismatics sites us<strong>in</strong>g Google illustrated that “commercial and personal sources dom<strong>in</strong>ate the
discipl<strong>in</strong>e of ancient numismatics as presented by Google” (Heath 2010, 41). Nonetheless, this
subsection focuses on nonprofit organizations and academic digital projects <strong>in</strong> numismatics and
outl<strong>in</strong>es some issues that will need to be addressed to create a digital <strong>in</strong>frastructure for this discipl<strong>in</strong>e.
Numismatics Databases
One of the largest organizations dedicated to the field of numismatics is the American Numismatic
Society (ANS). 426 The ANS has perhaps the largest numismatics database available onl<strong>in</strong>e (over
600,000 items) and provides access to a searchable database of “co<strong>in</strong>s, paper money, tokens,
‘primitive’ money, medals and decorations” from all over the world. In April 2011, the ANS released a
new version of their database entitled “MANTIS: A Numismatic Technologies Integration Service.” 427
This database <strong>in</strong>cludes extensive images of co<strong>in</strong>s from the ancient world (Hellenistic Greece and the
Roman Republican Period <strong>in</strong> particular), and <strong>in</strong>cludes a useful feature where search<strong>in</strong>g/brows<strong>in</strong>g will
only retrieve records/objects that have images. MANTIS can be either browsed or searched, and for a
quick start a user can select a co<strong>in</strong> image from one of the ANS departments <strong>in</strong>clud<strong>in</strong>g Greek, Roman,
Byzant<strong>in</strong>e, Islamic, East Asian, Medieval, etc. While the entire database can be browsed at once, a
variety of brows<strong>in</strong>g facets can be chosen to create filtered results sets <strong>in</strong>clud<strong>in</strong>g artist, authority,
category, century, deity, denom<strong>in</strong>ation, dynasty, f<strong>in</strong>dspot, material, object type, person, etc. While a
“quick search” of the entire database can be conducted, an advanced search<strong>in</strong>g option is also available.
The user can comb<strong>in</strong>e search terms by choos<strong>in</strong>g a variety of search fields <strong>in</strong>clud<strong>in</strong>g keyword, century,
color, denom<strong>in</strong>ation, geographical location, legend, reference, subject and type. The Greek, Roman
and U.S. collections can be searched through a map <strong>in</strong>terface. Many numismatic object records <strong>in</strong>clude
one or more digital images, descriptive <strong>in</strong>formation such as object type, material, weight,
denom<strong>in</strong>ation, region, person illustrated on the co<strong>in</strong>, and also provide stable URLs for l<strong>in</strong>k<strong>in</strong>g. 428 In
addition, each object record can be shared us<strong>in</strong>g a variety of social bookmark<strong>in</strong>g sites and <strong>in</strong>cludes
downloadable metadata <strong>in</strong> the form of KML, Atom, RDF and XML. 429
Another significant onl<strong>in</strong>e collection with a focus on Roman co<strong>in</strong>s is Roman Prov<strong>in</strong>cial Co<strong>in</strong>age
Onl<strong>in</strong>e (RPC Onl<strong>in</strong>e). 430 This website was created by the University of Oxford and is funded by the
AHRC. While the current project is conf<strong>in</strong>ed to co<strong>in</strong>s from the Anton<strong>in</strong>e period (AD 138–192), one
goal of the RPC series project is to produce a “standard typology of the prov<strong>in</strong>cial co<strong>in</strong>age of the
Roman Empire from its beg<strong>in</strong>n<strong>in</strong>g <strong>in</strong> 44 B.C. to its end <strong>in</strong> AD 296/7” and a model for putt<strong>in</strong>g more
collections onl<strong>in</strong>e. The current database is based on 10 collections and <strong>in</strong>cludes <strong>in</strong>formation on “13,729
co<strong>in</strong> types based on 46,725 specimens (9,061 of which have images).”
RPC Onl<strong>in</strong>e provides both a quick search of the whole collection and three specialized types of
searches. The first specialized type is an identification search (“to identify a co<strong>in</strong> or f<strong>in</strong>d a standard
reference”) where the user can search by city, obverse or reverse design, reverse <strong>in</strong>scription (<strong>in</strong>cludes a
Snible created the HTML edition with help from some volunteers and also scanned the photographs <strong>in</strong> this collection. Another large website created by an
<strong>in</strong>dividual enthusiast is “Magna Graecia Co<strong>in</strong>s,” http://www.magnagraecia.nl/co<strong>in</strong>s/<strong>in</strong>dex.html.
426 http://numismatics.org/
427 http://numismatics.org/search/
428 See for example: http://numismatics.org/collection/1944.100.45344
429 The XML for the above example can be found at: http://numismatics.org/collection/1944.100.45344.xml
430 http://rpc.ashmus.ox.ac.uk/