About 600 RIC X photographed gold coins from the British Museum added to OCRE

Before the holiday, I received a spreadsheet export from Richard Abdy, one of the curators in the Coins & Medals department at the British Museum, which includes all of the photographed gold coins from RIC volume X. This represents an addition of approximately 600 objects to Online Coins of the Roman Empire. Quite a few of these contributions represent the only photographed example of the type.

Gold coins from RIC 10 in OCRE.

Swiss National Museum joins Nomisma

Under the direction of long-time Nomisma scientific committee member Christian Weiss, the Swiss National Museum has joined the Nomisma Linked Open Data cloud, providing data for nearly 8,500 coins in the collection to various online type portals, including Hellenistic, Roman Republican, Imperial, and British Iron Age coinage.

The most significant contribution comes in the form of 8,000 Swiss coins from the Medieval to Modern periods in the prototype Online Swiss Coin Archive (OSCAR) project, which catalogs more than 9,000 typologies produced in Switzerland from 491 CE to the present day. Already, several hundred coins from Berlin and Winterthur were accessible through OSCAR in previous data imports. While OSCAR is not yet complete (there is much work remaining in creating Nomisma URIs for Swiss authorities and denominations), the preliminary RDF data for OSCAR have been uploaded into the Nomisma SPARQL endpoint, facilitating more advanced visualization and context in associated Nomisma URIs (see Zurich, for example). With the Swiss National Collection online, more than 40% of the Swiss types in OSCAR are illustrated by at least one photographed specimen.

OSCAR 257, a 1533 schilling from Zurich

More than 8,000 Roman Imperial Coins from the BnF added to OCRE

More than 8,000 Roman Imperial coins from the Bibliothèque nationale de France have been integrated into Online Coins of the Roman Empire. This is a significant addition to the project, but does not represent the fully body of the BnF's material. The import includes the issues from Augustus to Trajan, a portion of the Hadrianic collection, and later coins from Carus to Diocletian.

This represents the BnF's first contribution to OCRE after providing large amounts of Roman Republican and Hellenistic coinage and a modest number of British Iron Age coinage to Iron Age Coins in Britain. Presently, the Bibliothèque nationale has made nearly 40,000 coins available in the numismatic Linked Open Data cloud.

A BnF coin (IMP-139) with IIIF images of type Hadrian II.3 510