FY2016 Report Andrew Reinhard, Director of Publications

Report of Andrew Reinhard, Director of Publications

October 29, 2016

The ANS published three books in the past fiscal year: Monuments in Miniature: Architecture on Roman Coinage, by Nathan Elkins, The Banknotes of the Imperial Bank of Persia: An Analysis of a Complex System with Catalogue, by Michael Bonine and edited by Jere Bacharach, and Irritamenta: Numismatic Treasures of a Renaissance Collector, by John Cunnally.

Wealth and Warfare: The Archaeology of Money in Ancient Syria, by Frédérique Duyrat, will be published on November 4th. Two other books will be published by the end of 2016: The Art of Devastation, edited by Peter van Alfen and Patricia Phagan, and Coins, Artists, and Tyrants: Syracuse in the Time of the Peloponnesian War, by Wolfgang Fischer-Bossert.slide015

 

Peter van Alfen produced another four issues of ANS Magazine, and Andrew Reinhard continues to create and publish the digital edition for Members to read online on any device.

The American Journal of Numismatics is currently under the shared editorship of Ute Wartenberg (for ancient material) and David Yoon (for medieval, Islamic, Asian, and modern submissions). AJN 27 was published earlier this summer, and AJN 28 is now at the printer, and will ship in February. Thanks to the efforts of Oliver Hoover and others, the journal is now back on its regular, annual schedule. We expect AJN 29 to arrive in December 2017.

The Colonial Newsletter is under new editorship with Christopher McDowell at the helm. His first issue will be printed in November, tipping the scales at over 60 pages.

Publishing is more that just printing books and periodicals. It strives to fulfill the ANS’s mission of disseminating numismatic scholarship to as wide an audience as possible in as many ways as possible. This includes digital publication.slide016

Our most important publication is our website, numismatics.org, that has undergone a complete transformation over the past few months. Thanks to the efforts of Ben Hiibner, the ANS now has a modern website with better functionality and an easier way to find what you are looking for. Numismatics.org is the world’s portal into the collections and activities of the ANS, and is our most widely read publication.

The website is the home of major collections and projects including our largest undertaking, Online Coins of the Roman Empire (OCRE). As we near the end of the two-year project funded by the NEH, the ANS, under the guidance of Ethan Gruber, has, as of this week, over 100,000 Roman Imperial coins combined from our numismatic partners worldwide. These coin records are all tied to every volume in the Roman Imperial Coinage series, and are provided as a free resource to anyone interested in coins of the Roman Empire.

Similar, smaller efforts proceed with the ANS’s online homes for Coinage of the Roman Republic Online (CRRO), coins from the Argeid Dynasty (Pella), Seleucid Coins Online (SCO), and the numismatic materials from the Egyptian National Library. All of the new numismatic data are catalogued under the standardized vocabulary established by Nomisma.org and the Nomisma steering committee, an international group of scholars working together to ensure data consistency across the whole of numismatics.

These online collections both supplement and complement the ANS’s own massive collection, which can be researched in MANTIS, with records linked to searchable online archives held in ARCHER, and our library collections housed in DONUM. MANTIS, DONUM, and ARCHER all work together to provide context to our holdings, value-added information that goes well beyond a coin’s portrait. This, too, is provided free of charge to any who wish to explore our data.

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One other resource free to researchers is the ANS’s Digital Library. The Digital Library contains unpublished numismatic dissertations and theses. It also contains scanned ANS monographs, most of which are out of print or are difficult to find. These searchable scans were paid for through the 2016 Humanities Open Book Project grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The ANS was one of eight scholarly publishers to receive funds for this project, the goal of which is to rescue and resuscitate out-of-print and rare books, publishing them online at no charge to the reader. The ANS took this one step further, converting the scans into pure data that can be read on any device in any format. Not only that, but this converted data facilitates the linking of ANS publications and scholarship to the work and publications of other researchers at other institutions, creating a web of knowledge heretofore impossible to achieve. By actively promoting Open Access scholarship, the ANS plays its part in 21st-century interdisciplinary scholarship, removing all barriers to entry.slide018

Our open accessibility has not gone unnoticed. In the past fiscal year, numismatics.org received over 1,000,000 pageviews from nearly one quarter of a million sessions. Visitors from 196 countries came to numismatics.org over the past year. For our online projects, OCRE was used by over 32,000 people who spent on average over five minutes per session searching for Roman Imperial coinage. 37,000 people used MANTIS to search our own collections.slide019

Not all numismatic publication needs to be scholarly. It shouldn’t be. To that end, the ANS continues to conduct outreach through social media of every variety. Coin images are posted to Pinterest and Instagram. The ANS promotes its work via Twitter and Facebook reaching thousands of people each day. Our YouTube and Vimeo channels host ANS lectures given over the past couple of years. Our Pocket Change blog continues to explore the ANS’s collections and introduces the people behind that research.

The ANS publications program has created the “new traditional” model for communicating our mission, and for sharing our collections and its attendant scholarship. We are excited for the future, and we are creating that future now.slide020

Return to FY2016 Annual Report