Hi all, Today, the Kittredge Numismatic Foundation<http://www.kittredgecollection.org>website goes live to the public:
"John Kittredge was well known as a generous and supportive member of the numismatic community, both in Worcester, Massachusetts and in New England. Much of his collection concentrates on Crowns and Talers from the 15th century onward. He also has a collection of U.S. coins, New England Numismatic Association (NENA) medals, tokens and other items. All told he had over 7,200 coins and other items that are now in the collection. Upon his death, John?s collection went to the Kittredge Numismatic Foundation. The mission of the Foundation is to preserve John?s collection, to promote numismatics in the New England region, and to generally provide an educational and research source for the greatest community possible." The site is based on the best practices established for describing coins in EAD originally developed at the University of Virginia Library as part of the University of Virginia Art Museum Numismatic Collection<http://coins.lib.virginia.edu>and published in the soon-to-be-printed proceedings for the Computer Applications and Quantitative Methods in Archaeology conference held in Williamsburg, Virginia March 2009. The coding framework (cocoon/solr), originally developed for the UVA collection, has since been released publicly to sourceforge under the project name: Numishare<http://sourceforge.net/projects/numishare/>. While Numishare is not quite ready for its first official release, the code in the subversion trunk is more or less working and available to play around with (although I should note that the wiki for documentation is still being written!). The Kittredge Collection's backend allows for the creation and editing of data with XForms in the tomcat application, Orbeon. While the XForms editor has not yet been integrated into the trunk, it is available for testing in the kittredge branch of the subversion repository. In the coming weeks, I will finalize the XForms application for editing coin data and bring it into the trunk for in preparation for the official release of the Numishare application. The Kittredge Collection website is a work in progress. It will continue to grow in the coming months, with more images of coins and more categorical metadata being added to the collection. Nevertheless, the site is a demonstration of EAD's competency in describing artifacts in a robust and useful way. Future of the project: * Link images to all records * Provide high resolution images and integrate adore-djatoka JPEG-2000 viewer * Clean up data and normalize places and names * Integrate non-coin artifacts into the site. A VRA Core viewing stylesheet already exists. Since there is no accepted standard for using EAD to describe art objects, I have opted for VRA Core to describe them. -Ethan Gruber
