Wednesday, January 3, 2018

Fralin Museum coin collection leaps forward, embraces IIIF

The Fralin Museum at the University of Virginia numismatic collection has received a major functional update thanks to collaboration with the Libary's Information Technology group (particularly, Mike Durbin). The data and images at long last have been migrated into the university's institutional repository--the data have been updated to conform to the latest version of the NUDS schema (with TEI namespaced for bibliographic references) and the images are now available through IIIF web services. I have updated the record page code to use the Leaflet IIIF plugin, so all high resolution images are zoomable now.

Tetrachrachm of Antiochus available in SCO. 1990.18.8

As such, the IIIF service metadata are exposed in the RDF that is harvested into the Nomisma.org SPARQL endpoint (according to the Europeana Data Model spec), and the zoomable images are available in OCRE, CRRO, PELLA, and now, Seleucid Coins Online, for which the Fralin has contributed one coin of Antiochus I thus far.

In total, 427 coins in the museum (more than 80%) are hooked into the broader ancient world linked data cloud, available not only through numismatic linked data systems, but also broader aggregations of ancient world materials from Pelagios Commons, to which the Fralin has contributed since at least 2012 or 2013.

A zoomable Fralin aureus of Hadrian displayed in OCRE. http://numismatics.org/ocre/id/ric.2.hdn.271b

As Seleucid and Ptolemaic Coins Online expand in the next few years as part of the broader NEH-funded Hellenistic Royal Coinages project, more Hellenistic coins from the Fralin will be linked in and made available to students and scholars of numismatics. Although the Fralin's collection is so small that no numismatist would travel there to conduct research (unlike the major collections of the American Numismatic Society and the British Museum), these coins and others from small university and civic museums can be made available for research, filling in gaps between larger collections and painting a more complete picture of the circulation of ancient coinage. Indeed, one of the Fralin's aurei of Trajan (a reissue of Tiberius) is unique among all collections contributing to OCRE, now totally 110,000 objects (RIC Trajan 821).

Other Updates

The version of Numishare running on the Scholars' Lab server is circa spring 2013, predating the migrating from the now-defunct Apache Cocoon to Orbeon. There's virtually no way of testing code changes locally, and so I had to roll the dice on very minor updates on the Scholars' Lab test server. These updates included the implementation of the Leaflet IIIF libraries, as well as some minor changes to the map function to fix a glitch with deprecated URLs for the Digital Atlas of the Roman Empire's Imperium Romanum baselayer in OpenLayers. I also replaced the Google Maps physical layer with one published by Mapbox. I'd migrate from OpenLayers to Leaflet entirely, but ideally, the entire platform should be migrated to the current version of Numishare.

A link to the record in Virgo (the online library catalog) has also been added into the record. This URI is stored within the NUDS control as an otherRecordId[@semantic='rdfs:seeAlso'], and therefore comes through in the RDF in the rdfs:seeAlso property.


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