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.