Object lot provenance published to Mantis

The migration of the American Numismatic Society collection database to CollectiveAccess has enabled significant enhancements in the usability and searchability of our online database, Mantis. One such improvement that we have recently introduced into Mantis pertains to the provenance of object lots acquired by the ANS through donation or purchase. Provenance (findspots, hoards, or previous collections) has been cataloged sporadically throughout the collection on an item-level basis, but until now the ANS did not provide metadata about the immediate acquisition activity of groups of objects acquired in the same lot from the same entity.

There is now a landing page for each lot in the ANS collection, for example, the famous Edward T. Newell bequest, 1944.100, which contained more than 80,000 objects, primarily in the Greek and Roman department. The object lot metadata is stored in CollectiveAccess since accession history is a built-in function of any museum-oriented database. However, when publishing to Mantis, we had to consider into which format we would export from CA so that it could be rendered and integrated into Numishare. After consulting the Linked Art email list, we implemented CIDOC-CRM where the lot is a "Collection" (la:Set) exemplified by a Human-Made Object with a Acquisition following the Linked Art provenance model. Each lot in Mantis is downloadable as RDF/XML, Turtle, and Linked Art JSON-LD which illustrates this data model.

After creating landing pages by serializing the CIDOC-CRM RDF into HTML, I expanded the user experience to include a list of published objects that are part of the lot (with photographs), as well as a map indicating the geographic distribution (mints, hoards, findspots, and places of issue) of the objects within the lot.  These maps and example object lists will be familiar to our typical users. Additionally, I implemented the d3.js-based statistical analysis functionality for typological distribution, which would enable a user to generate a bar chart based on a variety of parameters, such as the distribution of departments, authorities, materials, etc. contained with the lot.

Metadata and related content to 1944.110

 

Furthermore, the people and organizations that contributed the lot to the ANS (whether individual donors or auction houses from whom the ANS purchased the lot) have their own landing pages as well. These landing pages aggregate all lots associated with an entity and the distribution maps and specimen list includes all objects associated with the entity. 

The ANS accession history with the Classical Numismatic Group

Now that all the lots that can be published have been, I have updated the code for the individual object pages to incorporate some of these metadata into the user interface, making it possible for users to navigate from coins in the ANS collection to lot records exhibiting coins of related provenance, as well as navigating from coins to the people or organizations that contributed them to the ANS. This acquisition event now appears in all ANS object records with a public lot, in addition to the occasional item-level provenance pertaining to previous collections prior to acquisition by the ANS.

Additional provenance related to the Newell bequest for 1944.100.19809

 

I should note that the lot metadata is not directly text searchable at the moment, and this work will have to wait until a future period. So you can't search "JP Morgan" in Mantis to get a list of objects donated to the ANS by the financier or his son.