Most of the ANS collection migrated to CollectiveAccess

Several weeks ago, the North American department was migrated from the ANS' old FileMaker curatorial database into our new CollectiveAccess database system. The intermediate clean-up work was substantial and undertaken in OpenRefine by Sami Norling, who is now a data scientist for the Smithsonian Institution.

There is substantial overlap between the persons who appear on or are responsible for the issue of coinage (including designers) between North American and Medals and Decorations, and much care was taken to disambiguate between these entities and those already created in ColletiveAccess in previous department migrations. There is also quite a large number of corporate organizations responsible for issuing tokens, notes, etc., which has gone through a rigorous normalization process to standardize names and link to Wikidata.org, when possible. The resulting quality of the North American department is substantially improved (especially when linking places to Geonames.org), which is plainly visible when using the Mantis browse page and clicking on individual object links.

To date, Sami has completed the Islamic, South Asian, and North American departments, which have all been imported into CollectiveAccess and republished to Mantis. Sami has also just completed her work on the Latin American department, which will be prepared for upload into Mantis within the next few weeks.

I completed Medals & Decorations a year ago, and Greek, Roman, and Byzantine in May, which I blogged about here and here.

Only East Asian, Medieval, and Modern European departments remain to be migrated, which will hopefully conclude by the end of this year.