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Coins in the library: the creation of a digital collection of Roman Republican coins

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Abstract

In 2001, Rutgers University Libraries (RUL) accepted a substantial donation of Roman Republican coins. The work to catalog, house, digitize, describe, and present this collection online provided unique challenges for the institution. Coins are often seen as museum objects; however, they can serve pedagogical purposes within libraries. In the quest to innovate, RUL digitized coins from seven angles to provide a 180-degree view of coins. However, this strategy had its drawbacks; it had to be reassessed as the project continued. RUCore, RUL’s digital repository, uses Metadata Object Description Schema (MODS). Accordingly, it was necessary to adapt numismatic description to bibliographic metadata standards.With generous funding from the Loeb Foundation, the resulting digital collection of 1200 coins was added to RUCore from 2012 to 2018. Rutgers’s Badian Roman Coins Collection serves as an exemplar of numismatics in a library environment that is freely available to all on the Web.

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Notes

  1. Crawford questioned the legality of Sulla’s military issues.

  2. http://nomisma.org/.

  3. http://numismatics.org/crro/.

  4. http://numismatics.org/rrdp/.

  5. This excludes the Aes Rude which is not a coin.

  6. https://comminfo.rutgers.edu/.

  7. https://collections.libraries.rutgers.edu/roman-coins/.

  8. http://numismatics.org/search/.

  9. http://rucore.libraries.rutgers.edu.

  10. https://www.loc.gov/standards/mods/.

  11. https://www.loc.gov/standards/mets/.

  12. https://www.getty.edu/research/publications/electronic_publications/intrometadata/crosswalks.html.

  13. https://www.loc.gov/ead/.

  14. https://www.loc.gov/standards/vracore/.

  15. http://core.vraweb.org/examples/html/example010_full.html.

  16. https://web.archive.org/web/20150918172249/http://wiki.numismatics.org/nuds:nuds.

  17. http://nomisma.org/nuds.

  18. https://www.rdatoolkit.org/.

  19. https://www.getty.edu/research/publications/electronic_publications/cdwa.

  20. http://vraweb.org/resourcesx/cataloging-cultural-objects/.

  21. http://id.loc.gov/authorities/names.

  22. http://id.loc.gov/authorities/subjects.

  23. https://www.getty.edu/research/tools/vocabularies/aat/.

  24. http://vocab.getty.edu/page/aat/300037266.

  25. See obverse legend in RRC 234/1 (http://numismatics.org/crro/id/rrc-234.1).

  26. https://www.handle.net/.

  27. https://www.doi.org/.

  28. https://schema.datacite.org/.

  29. See Badian Collection (https://doi.org/10.7282/T38S4T0Z) and CRRO (http://numismatics.Org/crro/id/rrc-294.1).

  30. https://njdigitalhighway.org/.

  31. https://collections.libraries.rutgers.edu/roman-coins.

  32. https://dp.la/.

  33. https://www.loc.gov/standards/datetime/.

  34. https://www.iso.org/iso-8601-date-and-time-format.html.

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Acknowledgements

The authors thank Ronald Jantz, Fernanda Perrone, T. Corey Brennan for reviewing an earlier draft of this paper and providing subsequent feedback. The first author thanks Michael Lesk for his continued support. The authors also thank the anonymous reviewers who contributed significantly to improving this paper.

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  1. University Libraries, The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, USA

    Annamarie C. Klose

  2. Rutgers University Libraries, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, New Brunswick, NJ, USA

    Isaiah Beard

  3. McGill University Library, McGill University, Montréal, Québec, Canada

    Scott Goldstein

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Klose, A.C., Beard, I. & Goldstein, S. Coins in the library: the creation of a digital collection of Roman Republican coins. Int J Digit Libr 24, 103–115 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00799-022-00338-x

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