At long last, we have migrated the objects accessible in the SITNAM public database into a CollectiveAccess back-end. SITNAM was initially launched as a database that mirrors the functionality of the ANS collection, MANTIS, but for objects from public or private collections that don’t have permanent, stables URIs. The test case was for the Roman Republican Die Project,
for which there are tens of thousands of Republican coin
images–largely from auction catalogs–pasted into cards and binders.
The specimen data were stored in spreadsheets, but migrating these data
into CollectiveAccess has opened the door to publishing improved
bibliographic data in SITNAM that was not present in the first iteration
of the database.
- Several hundred coins contained references to Coin Hoards of the Roman Republic,
and so those URIs have been added into the hoard field for these
records, and points for the hoard show up in maps of related specimens,
e.g., this coin cited in Hersh and Walker’s article on the Mesagne hoard. The hoards also propagate into the map-based search interface in SITNAM. Hoard is now a search facet in SITNAM. - There
is an improvement in publishing bibliographic references (which link to
the ANS library catalog, if applicable) associated with public
collections that have Nomisma URIs. Previously, only the collection name
was present in the record, but not the associated reference work, for
example, R. Wegeli and P. Hofer, The coins of the Roman Republic up to the year 27 (Bern, 1923) associated with coins in the collection of Bern, Switzerland. - Auction
records are better connected with the organization responsible with the
sale, often linking to the VIAF URI for the entity. The seller is now a
facet in the search interface, enabling a user to see all coins sold by
the Classical Numismatic Group, for example. - Fixed
typos or missing provenance records for about 1,000 coins in RRDP
(about 2% of the collection). The provenance records are now stored in
relational tables, which has made it possible to link a single specimen
from Levantine Coins Online (a coin of Yehud) into the auction catalog
record for a handful of Roman Republican coins from the RRDP dataset.
This is the groundwork for greatly improving provenance research. - Auction
dates are stored in the database, but not yet searchable in SITNAM, and
so that could be one area to improve in the future: to search for all
coins sold within a particular date range.
Several hundred coins of Yehud for the Levantine Coins Online
project have subsequently been migrated into the SITNAM
CollectiveAccess back-end, which greatly simplifies the long-term
sustainability of disparate projects that need to publish coins from
auctions or excavations that do not have stable URIs maintained by the
holding individual or institution.
