ANS Latin American department updated in Mantis

Thanks to the hard work of Sami Norling, our contract data cleanup specialist, the Latin American department at the American Numismatic Society has been migrated from our 20 year old FileMaker Pro database to CollectiveAccess. The department consists of 32,000 objects, more than 29,000 of which are publicly accessible on Mantis. The data normalization process has significantly improved the consistency and quality of the department, with the majority of place names linked to Geonames.org URIs, making it possible to plot production places and a limited number of findspots on the Leaflet-based map interfaces. A significant number of people, corporate bodies, and dynasties have been linked to Wikidata.org, enabling the standardizing of names internally within the department and with similar objects in other departments (for example, there is substantial overlap in artists, issuers, and authorities from Medals and Decorations).

 

A map showing the distribution of production places and findspots of the Latin American department.

Students, scholars, and collectors of the coinage of Central, South America, and the Caribbean will find these improvements extremely useful. The integration of Geonames and, particularly, Wikidata will enable us to build the next generation of query and visualization features in Mantis once we complete the database migration process. The last remaining departments are East Asian, Medieval, and Modern European.