The E-Sylum:  Volume 10, Number 45, November 4, 2007, Article 11

ANS OPENING UP COLLECTION DATABASE TO WEB LINKS AND SEARCHES

[One problem with making databases accessible on the Internet
is that the content is often obscured by the interface -
while great information is available within, it is hidden
deep within the bowels of the system and its specialized
query mechanism rather than being directly accessible through
general search engines.

This week Sebastian Heath of the American Numismatic Society
announced an initiative to create deep links reaching down
into the ANS collection database, making it easier for other
web pages (and newsletters like ours) to reference individual
coins in the society's collection.  I encourage E-Sylum
readers to use these new links when referring to items in
the ANS collection, and pledge to use them myself.

The general system being proposed would be even more useful
if more numismatic organizations institutions (commercial
and nonprofit alike) would adopt it.  Each has its own system
for naming web pages, but introducing a common naming convention
would go a long way toward easing the like of numismatic
researchers as well as boosting the overall profile of
numismatic information on the Internet.  The ANS is also
experimenting with using Google maps to display the geographic
location of mints, another useful feature. -Editor]

Sebastian Heath writes (in the AMNUMSOC-L Yahoo group):
"Along with ANS Fellow Neel Smith, I am working on a system
for bidirectional links between the ANS database and web
pages that refer to objects in our collection.

"We are trying to take advantage of the fact that the
sequence of characters "numismatics.org:1858.1.1" is
understandable as a reference to the coin with that accession
number, which happens to be the first ever donated to the
collection. We call the combination of domain name and
identifier a Domain Name ID or DNID.

"At a very simple level, if everybody referring to this
coin put "numismatics.org:1858.1.1" into their web pages,
Google would  eventually index those texts and then the
search http://www.google.com/search?q=numismatics.org:1858.1.1
would list those resources.

"Going further, I have set up the ANS web-server so that it
can usefully handle URLs similar to:
http://numismatics.org/dnid/numismatics.org:1858.1.1 .

"1858.1.1" can be replaced with any valid ANS accession number."

ANS Digital Publications Project:
numismatics.org/dpubs

Digital Coins Network:
digitalcoins.org "

  Wayne Homren, Editor

	coinbooks.org Web

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