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.

One of the largest tranches of Greek data added to the Nomisma LOD cloud

Over the last few months, one of the largest contributions to the Greek numismatic data cloud has been added into the Nomisma.org ecosystem:

Over 600 hoards from the Oxford CHANGE project, prepared by Leah Lazar, were published to Coinhoards.org. These are hoards predominately from Asia Minor encompassing An Inventory of Greek Coin Hoards (IGCH), Coin Hoards (CH) volumes 1-10, as well as some yet-unpublished materials. These CHANGE hoards are issued at new, canonical URIs, and the references indicate whether the contents are derived from IGCH and one or more previous Coin Hoards volumes. The contents of these hoards are relatively general--much like those of IGCH--with numbers or ranges of numbers of coins for broad typologies, e.g., "ca. 100 tetradrachms of Alexander the Great of Cyme." Nevertheless these contents improve the geographic distribution of the Nomisma concepts.

CHANGE 434 hoard with distribution map, contents, and CH references.

 

The IGCH hoards already published in Coinhoards.org which fall within the Asia Minor sphere of CHANGE (about 200) have had contents updated to include more granular lists of coin type URIs in Hellenistic Royal Coinages (HRC), Corpus Nummorum, or IRIS. This means the hoard listings have more complete typological metadata to query within Coinhoards.org itself, but now the hoards will propagate into the maps for types published by IRIS and HRC, as well as any Nomisma.org entities related to those types. Finn Conway prepared these references, which were integrated into Coinhoards.org earlier in the spring.

Furthermore, just several days ago, 11,000 coins were ingested into Nomisma's SPARQL endpoint from the CHANGE Site Finds database. These finds link to 82 different findspot locations, initially represented by Pleiades or Geonames URIs which were reconciled to Wikidata URIs upon upload into Nomisma and linked into Wikidata's geographic hierarchy. See the image below for a distribution map of a type minted in Sardis found in various excavations elsewhere in Turkey.

 

Sardis Hochard 2020 4.9.1837-57 with map of finds

 

The types from IRIS were also re-imported into Nomisma's SPARQL endpoint, as well as any physical specimens from Paris, Berlin, and the British Museum which were contributing to that project. IRIS now points directly to the Nomisma SPARQL endpoint, rather than its own internal one, which will now display all of the hoards and individual finds associated with IRIS types. In the image below, one can see the excavation coin distribution and coin hoards containing coins minted in Pergamum, including hoards from IGCH, CHANGE, and Coin Hoards of the Roman Republic.

A distribution map of the coins of Pergamum.

Altogether, this represents a significant enhancement to the research potential for Greek numismatics. A next step will be to improve the cataloging of the CHANGE hoards to point to coin type URIs.