The American Numismatic Society (ANS) is pleased to announce a new image-zooming feature in MANTIS (http://numismatics.org/search), the online database of its numismatic collection, and ARCHER (http://numismatis.org/archives), the Society’s digital archive. The ANS will now make its highest-resolution images freely available under a Creative Commons license, enabling researchers to zoom down into minute details of an object that were obscured in the lower-resolution images previously published. Furthermore, users may crop and download part or all of an image.
More than 160,000 numismatic objects have been photographed thus far and are available in this new interface including the Syracusan coins of Arethusa and the Agnes Baldwin Brett collection of photographs of her travels in Italy, Greece, and Turkey in the early 20th century. This new image feature is built on the International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF), a standard set of methodologies for the publication of images and metadata.
Beyond MANTIS, the high-resolution IIIF images of Roman Republican, Imperial, and Hellenistic coins will likewise be available within their respective online type corpora projects: Coinage of the Roman Republic Online, Online Coinage of the Roman Empire (OCRE), and PELLA. These projects have supported the integration of IIIF images since January, when Rutgers University Library became the first Nomisma.org partner to publish their images in this way. Since then, the Bibliothèque nationale de France, Harvard Art Museums, and KENOM have provided high-resolution images according to the IIIF standard. These four Nomisma partners combine to provide images for more than 11,000 coins; the ANS extends this coverage by more than 55,000 coins for these three corpora.
While access to high-resolution imagery is itself useful for numismatic research, these methodologies form the building blocks for standardized image annotation. In the future, it will be possible annotate and link iconographic motifs, monograms, counterstamps, and signatures on bank notes to standard vocabularies of concepts, which will enable new modes of classification and query for numismatic objects. These visual features may be annotated not only upon the ANS’s own coins, but any Nomisma partner that provides images that conform to the IIIF standard.
ANS Executive Director Ute Wartenberg said, “finally researchers can publicly access high-resolution images online to assist them in seeing minute details to help them in their work. This is something the ANS has wanted to do for a long time, and it has now become a reality.”
