ANS RECEIVES GRANT TO FUND ONLINE ROMAN COINS PROJECT

The American Numismatic Society (ANS) and the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World (ISAW) are delighted to announce the receipt of a major grant of $300,000 from the Division of Preservation and Access of the National Endowment for the Humanities. The grant, made as part of the Humanities Collections and Reference Resources program, will provide for the full implementation of the Online Coins of the Roman Empire (OCRE) project.

Co-­-directed by Dr. Andrew Meadows of the ANS and Professor Roger Bagnall of ISAW and managed by Dr. Gilles Bransbourg, OCRE is a ground-­-breaking initiative to create an online reference and cataloguing tool for coinage of the Roman Empire. Through its use of a Linked Open Data model, OCRE will provide full descriptions and illustrations of the 45,000 different types of Roman Imperial Coinage, as well as providing a union catalogue of specimens held in major collections. Currently the collections at the ANS in New York, the Bode Museum in Berlin and the University of Virginia Art Museum are included. It is hoped over the lifetime of the project to add the collections of the British Museum in London and the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris, as well as other collections as they become available online.

Within three years, OCRE will also begin to include coin find information from the UK’s Portable Antiquities Scheme and the European Coin Finds Network. OCRE will additionally provide tools to chart the distribution of coin types, and to analyze metrological, stylistic, and typological data on the basis of coins included in the union catalogue. The OCRE interface is currently fully searchable in eleven languages, rising to twenty over the course of the project.

To read the complete press release, see: The American Numismatic Society and the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World receive a major grant from the NEH (numismatics.org/wikiuploads/NewsEvents/2014_0404_PR_major-grant-NEH-.pdf)

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