February 12, 2015 – The Coin Cabinet of the Royal Library of Belgium continues to digitalize parts of its collection. There are already different collections available on-line.
A first database is an photo inventory of the 1385 bas-reliefs or token models in bronze and iron from the Marie-Louise Dupont Fund, which was acquired in 2006 by the Heritage Fund of the King Baudouin Foundation and entrusted to the medal department of the Belgian Royal Library.
A second part collects the religious medals of the Coin Cabinet, minted during the Ancien Régime.
A third set includes the siege coins from the Low Countries. Siege coins were struck in times of crisis or war. They are very interesting for the study of crises, wars and poverty.
The fourth database brings together the Belgian medals that have been produced in our region since the beginning of the French period in 1794 until the beginning of the twentieth century. This database is still expanding and is updated on a daily base.
Recently, a fifth database was added, namely the catalog of the collection of coins of the Prince-Bischopric of Liège (from the tenth century to the end of the Ancien Régime). The collection includes a total of 2,420 coins, of which 111 in gold, 1,740 in silver, 393 in copper, 172 in billon, 3 in lead and 1 in gilt-bronze. In most descriptions, a reference was added to the work of Jean-Luc Dengis, Les monnaies de la principauté de Liège (Wetteren 2006), a standard book where all the coins of the principality were studied and listed.
The online database can be accessed by visiting the website of the Royal Library of Belgium.
On the opening page, you can select on top ‘Collections’. Then you will find in the left column a list of all the departments of the Royal Library of Belgium. You can enter the website of the Coin Cabinet by clicking on: ‘Monnaies et Médailles’, underneath the subtitle ‘Collections spéciales’. There you can find an overview of the various online collections of the Coin Cabinet, as described above.
One of them is the catalogue of the coins of Liège. You can enter the database by clicking on ‘Monnaies de la Principauté de Liège’. You can also immediately enter the database by clicking here.
The first page gives you an overview of the different search fields. You can find the money from Liège by typing the word ‘monnaie’ in the field ‘Objet’, combined with the words ‘Principauté de Liège’ (in French) in the field next to ‘Pays/région/ville/période’. In addition, you can specify your search by exact date, the name of the city or the denomination of the piece that you want to look up, such as a florin, denier, obole and so on. Please note that for the time being, it is only possible to search with the French terms such as florin, denier, obole, etc. You can also perform specific searches by inserting your keywords in the fields ‘Description’, ‘Atelier’ or ‘Légende’.
With this new database, the Coin Cabinet gives further impetus to the online availability of its collection. The goal is to provide greater accessibility to the collection so that research and consultation of the collection will be easier and faster. Off course, the Coin Cabinet in Brussels welcomes you for further questions and information.
For more information follow the links in the article or go to the website of the Royal Library of Belgium.