Bibliothèque nationale de France join Nomisma

The Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF) has joined Nomisma, providing data for more than 2,000 coins of Alexander the Great, Philip III Arrhidaeus, and Lysimachus to PELLA, in time for the Oxford - Paris Alexander Project next week. Since Gallica implements IIIF, I have ingested IIIF image API metadata into Nomisma to make zooming possible. An example can be seen here.

There are now about 20,000 Alexanders in PELLA. With entry of the BnF into the consortium, now five of the most significant collections of ancient coinage contribute Linked Open Data to Nomisma and various related aggregation projects.

Florence Codine provided a concordance spreadsheet of Gallica and PELLA URIs, which I processed with PHP into RDF, extracting additional metadata from OAI-PMH. The script is on Github.

Münzkabinett Vienna joins Nomisma consortium

The Münzkabinett of Vienna is the newest member of the Nomisma consortium, providing data for about 1,500 ancient coins to OCRE, CRRO, and PELLA. Nearly 1,300 of these are Roman Imperial coins, 150 are Roman Republican, and about 100 Alexanders. Vienna is in the early stages of digitization, but it is one of the most significant collections of coins in the world.

The Münzkabinett of the Kunsthistorisches Museum Wien (Vienna in Austria) owns over half a million objects which make it one of the largest collections of its kind, and it can be traced back until the 16th century. It holds coins, medals and banknotes, but also coin dies, bonds and primitive money. Not only does the collection house unique rarities and priceless treasures, its abundance and completeness make it an essential tool for fundamental research in Numismatics and History.

The timing for Vienna's introduction into the numismatic linked open data cloud could not be more perfect. The Oxford-Paris Alexander project is convening in Oxford April 3-4, and so Vienna's entry into PELLA is a demonstration of the growing network of Greek coinage.