Tuesday, April 8, 2014

ANS and ISAW Receive Major NEH Grant to Complete OCRE

The American Numismatic Society and the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World receive a major grant from the NEH

The American Numismatic Society(ANS) and the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World(ISAW) are delighted to announce the receipt of a major grant of $300,000 from the Division of Preservation and Access of the National Endowment for the Humanities. 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. 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, 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 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 (http://pleiades.stoa.org), a joint ANS London Institute of Archaeology project to catalogue Coin Hoards of the Roman Republic (http://www.numismatics.org/chrr/), 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 (http://oxrep.classics.ox.ac.uk/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.”

Dr. Bransbourg will give a presentation on the project at the 39th Chicago International Coin Fair in Rosemont, Illinois, on Friday, April 11th, 2014 in the Kennedy Room, during an ANS reception taking place at 5:45 pm through 7:45 pm. He is also available for interview on +1(212)571-4470 ext. 156, or alternatively on +1(347)622-0106.

For more information contact Joanne Isaac at +1(212)571-4470 ext. 112 or isaac@numismatics.org

The American Numismatic Society, organized in 1858 and incorporated in 1865 in New York State, operates as a research museum under Section 501 (c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code and is recognized as a publicly supported organization under section 170 (b)(1)(A)(vi) as confirmed on November 1, 1970.  

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