Rutgers digitizes the Badian Collection of Roman Republican Coins

Discussion in 'Ancient Coins' started by Roman Collector, Apr 27, 2018.

  1. Roman Collector

    Roman Collector Well-Known Member

    The Rutgers University Libraries has digitized a collection of 1,250 coins from the ancient Roman Republic.
     
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  3. Valentinian

    Valentinian Well-Known Member

    It seems like one must click on coins individually on them to see their reverses. That site allows seeing the coins tilted angles (which is of little use), but doesn't seem to allow seeing both sides of one coin at the same time, which is typical for catalogs.

    Also, the site names the coins by Sydenham and Crawford numbers with Sydenham numbers first. To me, that is inexplicable. Sydenham has been outdated since 1973! It would be best if it were not cited at all.

    It has nice coins, but could be better designed.
     
    Last edited: Apr 27, 2018
  4. TIF

    TIF Always learning.

    That is a pet peeve of mine! Businesses and entities dealing in ancient coins know better than to just show one side of the coin even if it is just a thumbnail or preview... except Heritage :D (Why why why, Heritage??)

    Edited after I browsed the Badian site:

    Yeah, that is very bad design/functionality, at least for our purposes!
     
    Last edited: Apr 27, 2018
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  5. Valentinian

    Valentinian Well-Known Member

    I think Heritage is not as interested in showing both sides of coins because most of their coins are slabbed and graded. They are less interested in showing the coin than showing the grade. The proof is that the images come up showing the whole slab. If they showed mostly the coin the viewer's reaction might be, "I see the coin. I wonder what grade they gave it?" Rather, they show the one side of the slab with a prominent number (much easier to see than the coin itself), the reaction is, "I see the grade. Now I have been told what to think about the coin."
     
  6. TIF

    TIF Always learning.

    You nailed it. Also,there is limited space for the description in the overview, so of course instead of including a brief description of the coin's reverse they instead tout the TPG grade.
     
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  7. Whizb4ng

    Whizb4ng HIC SVNT DRACONES

    Sites like these often seem like the pet projects of the academics who work at some of the universities. I fully support academics who choose to do this (mainly because I benefit from it :angelic:) it is just that they often don't have the background in web design and the website, while moderately functional, becomes no where near ideal. Hopefully they take the time to maintain and improve it since these sites often seem to be created and then get forgotten about once the academic moves on.

    The one that comes to mind for me is the Coins and Currency Collections from the Special Collections of the University of Notre Dame Libraries: https://coins.nd.edu/. It looks like they received funding back in the day to make a website and have not updated or modernized it since. It is still a good resource if you are interested in American Colonial Coins

    I am a big fan of the digitization of archives I just wish they weren't so unwieldy most of the time.
     
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  8. dougsmit

    dougsmit Member

    Web design is like all arts in that it follows fads or limitations long after the reason has passed. There was a time when most of us had 14.4 dial-up modems and really suffered from images we did not want to see. There was a time that most people looked at web sites on computers and appreciated larger images. There was a time that books were hard to get published so things written in them were assumed to have value. We all have different pet peeves based on where we boarded and where we got off the fad-wagon.

    The one side of a coin thing bothers me but Coin Talk and eBay both do their best to discourage rectangular images. How many of us show coin avatars with both sides of the coin? Must out avatars be square images or could we make a vertical rectangular image that would fill some of that blank space rather than making such an image reduced to half size to be contained in the square? On eBay, posting one image of one side of a coin gets you twice as large a view of the item for sale as posting a two sided coin. Many people do not care what the reverse is on the coin anyway since they only collect portraits. Web design has to consider all these things and it is a lot cheaper to buy a canned package rather than to hire someone who could make a custom design that considered everything. In the 1980's I was tasked to work with a team from IBM who was writing software for my employer. I never talked to programmers but to a special breed of translators who were human enough to talk to customers and also to the super geeky guys who actually did the coding. We ended up with exactly what we wanted which did not become obsolete until almost as long a time had passed as it took to write the software. Those were the old days when obsolescence time was measured in months rather than seconds. Now books are obsolete before the ink dries. Software fares little better. Experts? Obsolete term.
     
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