05-29-2008, 07:48 PM
Hey everyone,
I'm putting the finishing touches on a project I've been working on since October--a digitization effort of the University of Virginia Art Museum's 500 or so Roman and Greek coins. The project was made possible with a $5,000 grant issued as part of a number of small-ish grants given to the UVA Library's staff members last fall to do innovative projects. Coincidentally, I was taking a Roman numismatics graduate class at the same time and the professor of the class had been interested in having the coins digitized for the last 15 years.
I'm adding some bells and whistles and doing some cleanup on the site to make sure it works perfectly in Firefox, IE, and Safari in time for its official launch sometime between July and September.
The coins were scanned at 2000 DPI, so the image quality is pretty mind-blowing. The grant money went towards paying a graduate student to look up each coin in the relevant numismatic catalogs (e. g. RIC for imperial stuff) and encode the data in an XML-based schema called Encoded Archival Description, which is widely used by archives and libraries for describing collections of objects like papers and photographs.
The site is still on a development server, so I'm attaching an image with the url for the site on it. I don't want Google crawling the site yet and the server isn't able to handle tens of thousands of hits.
I'm open to any suggestions you have for making the site better. So far, each coin has a list of index terms associated with it that can be used to search for additional related coins. A lot of the deities and personal/dynasty names have links to their related wikipedia articles. Please note that the essays you find need to go through one more round of edits before they're ready for publication online. Nine of the ten gold coins in the collection have essays, and all of the coins of Postumus from the Oliver's Orchard Hoards have a paper attached to them.
Please let me know if you find any bugs as well. Thanks for helping make this site as good as it possibly can be!
I'm putting the finishing touches on a project I've been working on since October--a digitization effort of the University of Virginia Art Museum's 500 or so Roman and Greek coins. The project was made possible with a $5,000 grant issued as part of a number of small-ish grants given to the UVA Library's staff members last fall to do innovative projects. Coincidentally, I was taking a Roman numismatics graduate class at the same time and the professor of the class had been interested in having the coins digitized for the last 15 years.
I'm adding some bells and whistles and doing some cleanup on the site to make sure it works perfectly in Firefox, IE, and Safari in time for its official launch sometime between July and September.
The coins were scanned at 2000 DPI, so the image quality is pretty mind-blowing. The grant money went towards paying a graduate student to look up each coin in the relevant numismatic catalogs (e. g. RIC for imperial stuff) and encode the data in an XML-based schema called Encoded Archival Description, which is widely used by archives and libraries for describing collections of objects like papers and photographs.
The site is still on a development server, so I'm attaching an image with the url for the site on it. I don't want Google crawling the site yet and the server isn't able to handle tens of thousands of hits.
I'm open to any suggestions you have for making the site better. So far, each coin has a list of index terms associated with it that can be used to search for additional related coins. A lot of the deities and personal/dynasty names have links to their related wikipedia articles. Please note that the essays you find need to go through one more round of edits before they're ready for publication online. Nine of the ten gold coins in the collection have essays, and all of the coins of Postumus from the Oliver's Orchard Hoards have a paper attached to them.
Please let me know if you find any bugs as well. Thanks for helping make this site as good as it possibly can be!
Ethan Gruber
![[Image: url_300.png]](http://www.romanarmy.com/rat/Files/url_300.png)
