During the process of migrating the American Numismatic Society curatorial database from FileMaker to CollectiveAccess, we formalized the semantic relationships between an object and associated places. In FileMaker, there were three basic fields for geography: mint, region, and locality, and the meaning of these fields might vary from department to department. In most cases, mint means "place of production," as in the place, however granular, where an object was generated. This could be a city, or if unknown, a broader administrative or historical region or the name of a country. The region field corresponded to historical regions in the Greek and Roman departments, e.g., Cappadocia or Thrace, or the names of modern nation-states associated with the object. For example, a coin of Charlemagne in the ANS collection would have a region of "France," which is useful for broader categorization of materials. This is now referred to as the "place of cataloging relevance" in the current ANS database and Mantis. Lastly, the locality field from FileMaker might be a catch all indicating the place where an object was intended to circulate. A bus token manufactured in Chicago (place of production) may have been intended for use in the local transit system of Birmingham, Alabama (place of issue).
Place of issue has been a searchable facet field in Mantis since the re-publication of ANS objects after migration into CollectiveAccess, and the majority of these places were aligned with Geonames (most often) or Wikidata (the Geonames entry didn't exist) URIs.
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| Place of Issue distribution map of the ANS collection |
Places of production (or mints) have been mappable locations in Mantis and other Numishare-based digital numismatic projects since the very first iteration of Mantis. Finally, after working on a Renaissance medals project (to be announced in the near future), I have updated the code in Numishare to index and render the places of issue in the various map interfaces throughout the platform. As a result, more than 60,000 objects in Mantis are now visible through these interfaces, providing a rich context for researchers, particular of modern numismatics. Obviously, not all objects in the ANS collection have been associated with places of issue within their database records, but this is an important first step in enhancing the geographic visualization of these materials.
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| Distribution map of Great Britain, with places of production and issue. |
