Updates to RRDP specimens

At long last, we have migrated the objects accessible in the SITNAM public database into a CollectiveAccess back-end. SITNAM was initially launched as a database that mirrors the functionality of the ANS collection, MANTIS, but for objects from public or private collections that don't have permanent, stables URIs. The test case was for the Roman Republican Die Project, for which there are tens of thousands of Republican coin images--largely from auction catalogs--pasted into cards and binders. The specimen data were stored in spreadsheets, but migrating these data into CollectiveAccess has opened the door to publishing improved bibliographic data in SITNAM that was not present in the first iteration of the database.

A coin from the Cisterna di Latina hoard

• Several hundred coins contained references to Coin Hoards of the Roman Republic, and so those URIs have been added into the hoard field for these records, and points for the hoard show up in maps of related specimens, e.g., this coin cited in Hersh and Walker's article on the Mesagne hoard. The hoards also propagate into the map-based search interface in SITNAM. Hoard is now a search facet in SITNAM. Likewise, coins from SITNAM (and other contributors to CRRO) will appear in the example specimens on hoard pages (see figure, below).
• There is an improvement in publishing bibliographic references (which link to the ANS library catalog, if applicable) associated with public collections that have Nomisma URIs. Previously, only the collection name was present in the record, but not the associated reference work, for example, R. Wegeli and P. Hofer, Die Munzen der romischen Republik bis zum Jahre 27 (Bern, 1923) associated with coins in the collection of Bern, Switzerland.
• Auction records are better connected with the organization responsible with the sale, often linking to the VIAF URI for the entity. The seller is now a facet in the search interface, enabling a user to see all coins sold by the Classical Numismatic Group, for example. 
• Fixed typos or missing provenance records for about 1,000 coins in RRDP (about 2% of the collection). The provenance records are now stored in relational tables, which has made it possible to link a single specimen from Levantine Coins Online (a coin of Yehud) into the auction catalog record for a handful of Roman Republican coins from the RRDP dataset. This is the groundwork for greatly improving provenance research.
• External links to collections databases (which are not Nomisma contributors) or auction databases, like CoinArchives are now visible in SITNAM and should also be visible on the type pages for CRRO. 
• Auction dates are stored in the database, but not yet searchable in SITNAM, and so that could be one area to improve in the future: to search for all coins sold within a particular date range.

 

Several specimens from La Grajuela Hoard (GRJ). 

 

Several hundred coins of Yehud for the Levantine Coins Online project have subsequently been migrated into the SITNAM CollectiveAccess back-end, which greatly simplifies the long-term sustainability of disparate projects that need to publish coins from auctions or excavations that do not have stable URIs maintained by the holding individual or institution.

Department of Classics at Cologne joins Nomisma

More than 100 Seleucid and Ptolemaic coins from the Department of Classics at the University of Cologne have been integrated into the Hellenistic Royal Coinages platform, the first tranche of a collection consisting of over 12,000 specimens. This is, in fact, the second collection housed at the University of Cologne to join Nomisma, the other associated with the Department of History and part of the NUMID consortium.

A Department of Classics coin among CPE I.2 B126

 

Princeton University joins Nomisma LOD cloud

The Princeton University numismatic collection has bee integrated into the Nomisma.org Linked Open Data cloud, with almost 3,600 coins linked to coin types in Online Coins of the Roman Empire, Coinage of the Roman Republic Online, and the various portals that fall under Hellenistic Royal Coinages. The majority of the coins have been photographed and are accessible as zoomable IIIF images. Although many coins are from excavations, e.g., Antioch, the contextual information is not yet expressed is LOD to populate geographic visualizations associated with types and Nomisma concepts as this phase. At some point, we should expect to see a large submission of Byzantine coinage from Princeton when the new joint typology project from Princeton-Dumbarton Oaks is ready for publication.

 
 

A Princeton coin among among others of Seleucid Coins (part 2) 2363b

Art Institute of Chicago joins the numismatic Linked Open Data cloud

The Art Institute of Chicago is the latest collection to join the growing international Nomisma.org Linked Open Data ecosystem, providing more than 200 Roman Imperial coins for Online Coins of the Roman Empire. This is the first portion of their numismatic collection to be integrated into the LOD cloud, and other ancient coins will be integrated in due course.

AIC coin 1920.1008 on RIC Septimius Severus 97 (denarius)

 

The images provided by the AIC are IIIF compatible, providing zooming functionality in the OCRE user interface, and they are also granted public domain licenses regarding their reuse in publications. 

Samarian coinage added to Levantine Coins Online

It had gone unannounced on this blog at the time, but in late March, 376 coin types from the upcoming A Corpus of Samarian Coinage, by Oren Tal, Haim Gitler, and Mati Johananoff, were published to Levantine Coins Online. The ANS has recently cataloged our relevant coins with these new Samarian URIs, which have subsequently been exported from Mantis into the Nomisma.org SPARQL endpoint. The ANS now contributes 255 of the 377 total coins linking to LCO, providing photographic examples of 162 of the 376 published Samarian types.

A screenshot of http://nomisma.org/id/samarian_coinage, with map and type examples

At least one of the ANS's objects is from IGCH 1504, providing a hoard coordinate point the related coin type and Nomisma.org numismatic concepts.

The type data were prepared for publication by Jessica Schillig. 

FileMaker Pro finally retired at the ANS

After about two decades, the American Numismatic Society has finally turned the lights off in its FileMaker Pro database. The last two departments, Medieval and Modern European were migrated into CollectiveAccess about one month ago, although not in an entirely completed form--the places, people, organizations, dynasties, and denominations still require further normalization by curator, David Yoon, over the next year before these entities are merged into the relational database system. Nevertheless, FileMaker Pro cataloging has ceased, marking a major step in a once-in-a-generation task of normalizing and migrating systems.

The ANS database system was a bespoke DOS-based system pioneered in the 1980s called PRIME. The ANS was among the first major numismatic collections to implement a database for cataloging, although it was never designed as a relational database (a technology which did exist at the time). The database was ostensibly a flat "spreadsheet" data entry system with more than 100 fields, most of which were uncontrolled free-text fields. Before the World Wide Web, curators never envisioned their catalog would become public, and quality and completeness were inconsistent across departments as curators developed their own idiosyncratic data entry processes.

At some point during the 2000s, this PRIME system was picked up and moved into FileMaker Pro, with little to no intermediary normalization. Indeed, many MSDOS special characters (non-ASCII and non-UTF-8) for tabs or other such breaks were retained within FileMaker. Since its inception in 2011, many thousands of lines of PHP code were necessary to transform the ANS' cataloging data into something generally usable on the web with Mantis. The code became more and more complex as we sought to reconcile type or hoard reference patterns to URIs in OCRE, Hellenistic Royal Coinages, or Coinhoards.org. The FileMaker->Mantis publication process was a house of cards.

In 2015, we decided that migrating from FileMaker Pro was a necessity and decided upon the open source collection management software, CollectiveAccess. CollectiveAccess was built on PHP and MySQL, with a fully customizable metadata entry system that could accommodate the significant complexity our curators require. Over several years, we customized and tested a numismatic data entry system for CollectiveAccess, but it wasn't until January 2023 that we officially began the data cleanup and migration process. Significant time and effort was invested over two years in reconciling entities to URIs in Linked Open Data controlled vocabulary systems--not only Nomisma.org, but also Wikidata and Geonames. Most ancient places in CollectiveAccess align to Nomisma and most modern ones align to Geonames. I am not certain of the exact percentage, but there is significant overlap between the rulers, kingdoms, artists, dynasties, issuers, etc. in our numismatic collection and Wikidata. This reconciliation will enable better quality and more complete query of our collection.

I myself worked on Medals and Decorations, as well as Greek, Roman, and Byzantine. Sami Norling, now of the Smithsonian Institution, helped tremendously with North and Latin American, Islamic, and South Asian. David Yoon completed East Asian several months ago and continues to iron out loose ends in Medieval and Modern.

Once these data have been migrated into a proper relational database system, the difficult and time-consuming work of normalization and reconciliation has already been completed. Going from PRIME to FileMaker Pro was kicking the can down the road and building a sustainable curatorial database. If we migrate from CollectiveAccess to another system in another 10 or 20 years, it will be much easier to migrate rigorously curated relational data than the free text fields that made up the ANS database for the last 40 years. This is a significant milestone in the ANS's technological history.

At long last: rewriting the Numishare search interfaces

Most users of Numishare, whether Mantis, OCRE, or another research portal, likely head directly to the browse page in order to drill down with faceted search terms. The search page, however, includes more granular textual entry, enabling query by keywords in the type description, dates, weights (for object collections), or fragments of the legend.

This advanced search interface has remained largely unchanged since I began development work on Numishare at the University of Virginia Library in 2007. In fact, some of the JQuery Javascript code was written by Matt Mitchell and I for some other digital humanities project in the Scholars' Lab, perhaps Johanna Drucker's Artists Books Online. This code was copied and pasted almost verbatim into Numishare for repeatable text search fields or drop down menus populated by Solr search facets. It is frankly amazing for this code to function without any real fault for 18 years.

Rewriting this interface and improving its usability has been on my agenda for many years, and I have finally gotten around to it as step 1 of a larger overhaul of Numishare's public UI which will ultimately represent "Mantis 3.0." These modifications will apply to any project that uses Numishare and will include greater integration of Wikidata API services to enhance the research context and query functionality within Numishare. Since many people and organizations (artists, makers, issuers, etc.) in Mantis have been linked to Wikidata entity URIs as part of our larger database migration project, this opens the door to exploiting the Linked Open Data underlying Wikidata to facilitate queries such as "show me all medals produced by artists living in Paris in 1880-1900", even if that information is not explicit within our own curatorial database. These features will come later in 2025-6 because the first step is making functional improvements with the data we have before moving on to restructuring our data indexing workflow to make it possible to conduct these sorts of queries.

The first iteration of the advanced search form lays out all available fields arranged in clearly-defined sections as faceted lists or text fields. Text fields for people and places will also query alternative labels, making it easier to find individuals by less common names we might harvest from Wikidata or Nomisma.

Advanced search form for Mantis

 

You may have already noticed that the Mantis home page has deprecated individual department search interfaces in favor of a single interface that enables selection of department(s) in a facet list. There is now just a simple keyword search input on the home page.

Following the implementation of the new advanced search form in Numishare, I moved on to tackle another long-held goal: to improve the map-based search interface. I have now implemented the advanced search form in the map search by enabling users to click on the "Filter" button embedded on the Leaflet map. This popup uses all faceted search fields for places and entities (rather than text fields), but now also implements new fields that could not be queried in the previous map interface: legends, type descriptions, etc. Now an OCRE user can query "ORIENS" in the reverse legend to generate a map of all mints which produced coins bearing the legend. Wildcards can be used in these searches.

A query of "EXERC*" in the reverse legend of the Roman department.

 

Furthermore, it is now possible to copy a permanent URL that depicts the map so that it can be distributed online or cited in a publication.

If you are a regular user of Numishare-based projects, you may need to hard refresh the page or clear your browser cache for the new Javascript functions to load.