A Digital Win, or, What 100,000 Objects Look Like

This week, the American Numismatic Society uploaded images of its 100,000th object into our online database MANTIS. The lucky coin was an aureus, a gold Roman Imperial coin from AD 196–211. It features a portrait of the empress Julia Domna on the obverse and the goddess Cybele seated in a chariot drawn by four lions on the reverse. Cybele was known as Magna Mater or the Great Mother, and her cult derived from ancient Asian beliefs that were absorbed into the Greco-Roman pantheon. Julia Domna was herself born in Syria so the coin is in many ways a tribute to Roman multiculturalism.

Our MANTIS database gives users an easy way to search or browse through the American Numismatic Society’s holdings, with records for over half a million coins, tokens, and related exonumia.
The search field has a multitude of categories that allow you to customize your search beyond a simple keyword. For example, when you click on the box for Denomination, a list with small check boxes appears so that you can click on the units that you want to see in the search results. Most importantly perhaps in the context of this post is the “Has Images” checkbox immediately above the Refine Search button, which will limit your search results to those for which digital images are available. So, for example, if you wanted to see all the American dies in the collection, you would simply check the United States box under Department, the Die box under Object Type, the “Has Images” checkbox, and then hit Refine Search. The results will show that we have 89 dies in the US department that have been digitized. Happy Browsing!

Although we are all very happy to have hit the six-figure mark, we’re hardly satisfied so here’s to the next hundred thousand!