Aims and development

The project has aimed at making the ancient coins at Uppsala University Coin Cabinet (UUC) available digitally in the cultural heritage-database ALVIN (www.alvin-portal.org). This is a first step in a project with the long-term ambition of making the whole collection of UUC available. The aim is to make the UUC a unique national and international resource for future research in arts and humanities.

The project was carried out February 2014–September 2017 as a collaboration between UUC, Gustavianum and Uppsala University Library (UUL). Division of responsibilities has been as follows: UUM (access to material and inventory, digitisation, working resources and working space, long-term development of digital information); Gustavianum (hiring of personnel, administration of fundings, technical support); UUL (maintenance, support and development of database).

An inventory of the material was done in 2014. Since ALVIN was made available for registry in 2015, material has been digitised in batches, first Roman republican coins (2015); Roman imperial coins (2015–2017); Byzantine coins (2016) and greek coins (2017). Technical development has taken place continuously during this time.


Results

All objects (4868 pieces) are now digitised in ALVIN: 858 Greek coins, 324 Roman republican coins, 3423 Roman imperial coins, 233 coins of the Byzantine empire and the Crusaders, 22 Celtic coins and 8 coins of the Migration period. The database entries are connected to authority files in ALVIN, for instance for persons depicted on coins. These entries connect to other resources. An object depicting the emperor Augustus, therefore, can be connected to a number of other resources relevant to this person through the authority file for Augustus.

There is also connections to internet resources outside of ALVIN, for instance Wikipedia-articles. A final development enables connections to other databases following the established terminology in numismatics. At present, such connections to the meta databases Coins of the Roman Republic (CRRO, http://numismatics.org/crro/) and Online Coins of the Roman Empire (OCRE, http://numismatics.org/ocre/) have been enabled. The ancient coins of UUC are thereby the first Nordic coin collection to be digitised in its entirety and connected to a major database structure. Through this, the scientific context of a coin collection can be re-created digitally.

The founding stone of UUC was put down in a time when science aimed at broad knowledge and complex collections. Combining object such as manuscripts and objects of art with for instance botanical collections was conventional. Coins had a natural place in this learned world. In the 18th and 19th century, numismatics developed as a research discipline and systematic coin-collections were created. However, through this, numismatists also isolated themselves from the rest of the scientific community.

Today, we can correct this through the possibilities we have of making collections accessible online. Several important collections have also been made available. However, most of them are traditional, systematic coin collection, moved to another technological structure. Electronic resources available today, however, offer a far wider range of possibilities. One of them is to combine material from different databases, as for instance in CRRO and OCRE. This technique constitutes a part of what is often called the semantic web, a technique where computers themselves gather information from digital resources. UUC is the first Nordic collection to be connected to such a function and thereby at the very forefront of international database development.

ALVIN offers even more possibilities. Firstly, the database will be made available through international search-engines for studies of cultural heritage. Further, we can re-create older collections which contained coins but have since been dispersed. However, ALVIN also in itself becomes a digital microcosmos of the arts and humanities with unlimited resources for the future.

The process has led to several experiences. One such regards time requirements. The quality of a database depends largely on the digital information, the metadata, registered in it. Developing high-quality metadata demands thorough inventory of the material by skilled personnel. Thus, the largest costs for a digitisation project may consist of ”ordinary” salaries.

It is also challenging to find a way of working which enables personnel lacking specialist training, such as students, to do large parts of the work. We have developed a work-flow where students/interns can work with most tasks with a shorter instruction/training. Inventory must be done by numismatically trained personnel or students with the necessary knowledge of the material. Photography/digital treatment or registry in the database, however, can be done by students/interns with some supervision.

Reaching a compromise between data quality and a high working pace is another challenge. We have arrived at a ”good enough”-standard through clear quality-definitions and working methods. It has also been decisively important to be connected to a larger database-project, which has been responsible for technical support, development and long-term handling of data.

Information about the project has been communicated through social media (the Facebook-page and Twitter-account of UUC), at two workshops and one conference: Italic Inscriptions and Databases (The Swedish Institute in Rome, 2014), XV International Numismatic Congress (Taormina, 2015) and the workshop Digitizing Matariki University Museum Coin Collections (University of Tübingen, 2015). A theme-issue about the ALVIN-projects at UUC was done for Nordisk Numismatisk Unions Medlemsskrift (see the bibliography).


Unforeseen technical and methodological problems

A more comprehensible work with inventory and cataloging than originally foreseen proved to be necessary, as there was no inventory of large parts of the Roman and Byzantine material. This means that for the first time, the whole of the collection of ancient coins has has been catalogued. An extensive renovations of the main building of Uppsala university, where the coin cabinet has its premises, started in the winter of 2016 and finished in the autumn of 2017. This affected work conditions and prolonged the project.

The fact that the project has taken longer than originally foreseen, however, also meant that we have been able to take advantage of the technical development of ALVIN during the course of the project. Database-entries generated late in the project thus have a higher quality than early entries. It could be desirable to digitise a material quickly, in order to achieve a uniform standard. But as the database develops continuously, it is impossible to avoid such problems completely. Additionally, the substantial experience gathered in the project has been valuable for the development of ALVIN’s registry-system.

Certain minor technical problems have been generated by the fact that several persons have been working with ALVIN simultaneously, and by the fact that the database is to function in several languages. Such problems have been considered ”growing pains” and easy to work around.


Integration of the project

The work has been integrated in the organisational structure inasmuch as the UUC, UUM and Gustavianum all use ALVIN for their digitisation projects. UUL is responsible for long-term handling of digital data, development of the database and technical support. UUC is responsible for development of information in the database-entries. Several new projects related to ALVIN have been realised or are planned. In 2015–2016 the collection of modern Swedish coins was digitised, in the autumn of 2017 the collection of Swedish medals from the late 18th c and onwards. Digitisations of the collections of chinese and islamic coins are planned.


Applications and new research questions

The material digitised in ALVIN is already in use. The fact that ALVIN offers Open Access high-resolution images makes it an extremely valuable resource for different types of publications. The metadata generated in the project, too, can be copied; thus the digitisation of the UUC coin collection functions as a basis for the digitisation of similar collections in the future. Above all, the project has provided development of methods for the digitisation which has started at Gustavianum. This will comprise all the museum collections in numismatics, art, archaeology, history of science and history, in total around 2 million objects. The project, therefore, is important to several future initiatives.

A number of more specific project ideas have been raised during the project:

- In the Uppsala collection, several proveniences are well-documented and can be traced several centuries back in time. As the archives of UUC, too, have been made accessible in ALVIN, proveniences of the ancient coins can be traced to earlier collections. The main example of this is the collections of the Augsburg art cabinet, the earliest donation of a coin-collection to Uppsala university in 1694, which can be re-created.

- A large find of bronze coins (circa 130 pieces) from Cyzicus in present-day Turkey has for the first time been catalogued and made available for research.

- The concept ”antiquity” and its history: the coin-images in ALVIN can be connected to a large number of other objects such as books and illustrations (for example Motiv ur Tyska kejsarrikets historia, Judiska, Persiska, Romerska och Svenska historien från andra halvan av 1600-talet, (”Motives from the history of the German empire and from Jewish, Persian, Roman and Swedish History”, http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:alvin:portal:record-86355). This gives new possibilities of studying how ancient phenomena –– in this case the Roman emperors –– have been approached later in history.