The Roman Coins project is a collaborative effort to bring the Rutgers’ Ernst Badian Collection of Roman Republican Coins fully into the digital realm and to contextualize its 1200+ items in such a way that students, researchers, and a broad section of the public can readily understand the general patterns of development in Roman money during its first 250 years.
The collection holds many coins that hold particular historic, economic, or artistic interest and is one of the largest of its type in North America. However, for a variety of reasons, the coins are not readily consulted in person. In order to make them broadly accessible for study and teaching, the Classics Department and Rutgers University Libraries are working together to create a web-based public portal and archive.
This summer with additional funding from the Classics Department and the dedicated efforts of three summer part-time employees, we were able to add another 200 coins to the portal, bringing the total to some 700 coins.
The portal features multi-faceted display of high-resolution images of individual coins and metadata specifically designed to render ancient numismatics comprehensible to non-specialists, while offering experts much in the way of original and unpublished research.
High-resolution digital imaging available in the Digital Curation Research Center was used to capture archival and presentation images for each coin in a format called Pyramid Tiff (or ptiff) that allows us to represent the same image at different spatial resolutions. This feature was developed for RUcore and is useful for viewing other formats such as maps.
To see ptiff in action, click on “view slideshow” below the coin image at https://rucore.libraries.rutgers.edu/rutgers-lib/47436/. Use the buttons to pan, zoom, and rotate the image. These are truly beautiful artifacts and the ptiff technology allows users to explore them like never before.
The user experience is further enhanced by specialized metadata detailing the legends and images found on the coins and newly implemented faceted browsing. Faceted browsing is available at the Coins portal where users can narrow searches by denomination, material, time period, moneyer, subject, and method.
To complete the digitization of the Badian collection, professor Corey Brennan (Classics Department) will apply for another grant from the Loeb Classical Library Foundation. These additional funds will enable us to image and ingest the remaining 500 coins into the RUcore portal. Professor Brennan will also use the Coins portal in a graduate seminar this Fall.
