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THE QATAR MUSEUM'S ONLINE COIN INTERFACEEd Hohertz writes: "The Qatar Museum has a large Islamic coin collection that is now (at least partially) available on-line. The search engine has been creatively done.." 
We mentioned the site's software a couple weeks ago. A video would do it more justice, so please do visit the site and try it out. It's a great way to visualize, sort and sift through the collection along many dimensions. -Editor As part of the re-opening of the Museum of Islamic Art (MIA) following extensive renovations, Qatar Museums and Years of Culture are delighted to launch the Coin Project - an innovative way to experience one of the largest and most impressive coin collections in the world. The Museum of Islamic Art (MIA) houses one of the most comprehensive collections of Islamic art in the world, with masterpieces from three continents spanning 1,400 years of history, including metalwork, ceramics, jewellery, woodwork, textiles, coins and glass. While an important challenge for any museum is how to curate and display the works within their collection, MIA's Coin Project is set to defy space, time and geography to make the coin collection accessible to the public all around the world. 
This ambitious project was delivered by COLLECTO, an expert creator of digital art experiences based in Germany. The company developed a state of the art production process for Qatar Museums. It combines highest image quality, unparalleled production speed and fully integrated data management. 
The specially created digital interface is fully interactive, showing different layers of visualisation, organising the coins by weight, material, age and more. The extraordinary scope of the project even enables users to flip the coins front and back, so that no detail is overlooked. Diverse audiences including schools and students, researchers and collectors (or simply the digital curious!) can explore and learn about the origin of each coin. 
This is the kind of interface I envisioned in the early days of the Newman Numismatic Portal. It didn't come to pass, but we had many more pressing issues to resolve before designing and building a whizzy interface. Besides, in order to power such an interface much effort must first go into assigning categories to each object. Perhaps one day artificial intelligence could cost-effectively create the needed metadata with an acceptably low error rate (remember, even humans would make mistakes at such a task). FWIW, what I had in mind for the U.S portion of NNP was a two-dimensional grid layout by era and type. Eras would be chosen to encompass key historical periods such as the Civil War vs. arbitrary decades; types would include coins, tokens, medals, paper money, etc. Users could drill down into each area to see numismatic items along with any related books, articles, lot descriptions etc. Wouldn't that be nice? One can dream, but with patience and hard work, dreams sometimes come true. The COLLECTO software illustrates the power of such a tool. -Editor
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THE BOOK BAZARRE
Wayne Homren, Editor The Numismatic Bibliomania Society is a non-profit organization promoting numismatic literature. See our web site at coinbooks.org. To submit items for publication in The E-Sylum, write to the Editor at this address: whomren@gmail.com To subscribe go to: https://my.binhost.com/lists/listinfo/esylum All Rights Reserved. NBS Home Page Contact the NBS webmaster 
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