Tuesday, February 28, 2017

Final four Mellon-funded TEI ebooks published

The final four of a group of 86 American Numismatic Society-published books have been checked and uploaded to our Digital Library. Here are some stats I was able to produce from various SPARQL queries of the TEI->Open Annotation RDF:

  • 349 mentions of 164 different Greek coin hoards published in IGCH in 193 sections in 14 books.
  • 266 unique references to nomisma URIs. 146 are mints or regions, and 87 of these identifiers are matches with Pleiades places. These mint references appear in 600 sections 51 books. Including direct Pleiades references (and not only those which are implicit by means of Nomisma concordances), there are 621 sections in these 51 books which will be accessible through the Pelagios Project.
  • 97 of the 266 references are to people, most of whom are linked to Wikidata and VIAF entities that are, in turn, linked to other systems, such as Social Networks and Archival Context
  • More than 1,400 coins in the ANS collection are referenced
  • 139 Roman Imperial coin types in OCRE
  • 4 Roman Republican coin types in CRRO 
These four are the final of 86 total books digitized as part of the NEH-Mellon Open Humanities Book program.  Many thanks to both the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Mellon Foundation for making this possible. The framework and methodologies implemented in this project will be applied to further digitization here at the ANS as we move toward making our entire collection of monographs freely and openly accessible, and I hope that other academic publishers and learned societies will follow in our footsteps in this endeavor.

These books go beyond simple transcription and publication as EPUB files. With links to our own research databases internally and externally to Linked Open Data information systems, we hope that these works will be transformed into research portals to further context about the people, places, events, etc. mentioned in the text. On the other side of the coin, so to speak, researchers interested about the entities, objects, coin hoards, etc. will have access to a wealth of historical information about these things and will gain access to our monographs not only from our own Library, Archive, and Museum systems, but through projects like Pelagios, Digital Public Library of America, and other large scale aggregators of cultural heritage materials.