May 1, 2014 – The American Numismatic Society (ANS) and the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World (ISAW) received a major grant of $300,000 from the Division of Preservation and Access of the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). 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.
This is a research result in OCRE’s user interface.
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, …
And OCRE links also to the database of the Staatliche Münzsammlung in the Bode Museum in Berlin.
… 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 available in eleven languages, for example in Italian.
The OCRE interface is currently fully searchable in eleven languages, rising to twenty over the course of the project.
Through its Linked Data approach, the OCRE project is designed to interact fully with other such initiatives being developed for the Ancient World, including ISAWs existing Pleiades project, a joint ANS-London Institute of Archaeology project to catalogue Coin Hoards of the Roman Republic, a joint ANS-British Museum project to establish a type catalogue of Roman Republican Coinage and Oxford University’s Coin Hoards of the Roman Empire project.
Executive Director of the ANS, Dr. Ute Wartenberg, commented. “The award of this major grant is exciting for the ANS, and pays tribute to the hard work and technical skill of the staff involved in the planning of the foundation stage of the project. We also owe a major debt to donors and members of the Society who have supported the project to this point.”
As of today, OCRE already represents one of the most extended available online resources covering the Ancient World. The grant from the NEH announced in March will provide for the completion of this important project.
For further information on OCRE read the articles in CoinsWeekly here and here.
And of course visit the OCRE website.
Here you can find the type catalogue of Roman Republican Coinage and Oxford University’s Coin Hoards of the Roman Empire project …
… the Coin Hoards of the Roman Republic …
… and the Pleiades project.