Thursday, January 5, 2017

Rutgers University's Badian Collection added to CRRO + IIIF support

Rutgers University's Badian Collection is the newest contributor to Nomisma.org, providing 682 Roman Republican coins to Coinage of the Roman Republic Online. The Rutgers University Libraries are the publishers of these data, and by means of their Fedora repository software and IIIF APIs, I was able to write a PHP script to harvest their MODS/XML (and other miscellaneous metadata records) and generate Nomisma-compliant RDF.

Following recent updates to Kerameikos.org's IIIF integration, I implemented the same modifications to Nomisma's RDF model: data objects for describing IIIF images and services according to Europeana Data Model specifications. The Nomisma documentation has been updated accordingly: http://nomisma.org/documentation/contribute#iiif.

The user interfaces in Numishare (and therefore CRRO) have been updated to optionally query for the dcterms:isReferencedBy property associated with examples of coin types. I have implemented the IIIF plugin for Leaflet to display the zoomable image in a Fancybox popup window. See the Rutgers coin on http://numismatics.org/crro/id/rrc-474.2b, for example. Several other partners have implemented IIIF, and I will reprocess these collections to add service metadata into their RDF dumps. It is on the ANS agenda for 2017 to deploy our own IIIF image server. In the coming years, it is my aim to implement an image annotation system that will make it easier to identify and tag symbols and iconographic attributes on coinage, which will facilitate a wider range of art historical or political/economic analyses of coins.