Over the last couple of days, I have been revamping one of the resources I built with our old Roman Coins Finds Adviser Ian Leins. He has since moved on to become a Curator within Coins and Medals in the British Museum with responsibility for Iron Age coins and their study and interpretation. Since then, Sam Moorhead has come into his role and we’ve revamped the Scheme’s database numismatics substantially. I’ve used the basis of this work to complete some major additions to the facilities we have for the identification of Roman coins. So this week, I have added:
- Google map with KML layer for Roman Mints (shown below)
- Added a Reece periodisation guide
- Enhanced the mint information to demonstrate under which Emperor these issuing places were active
- Enhanced the emperor information pages so that you can now see what denominations they issued, which Reece period they fit into, mints active, most recently recorded coins by our staff, and a county breakdown
- Tidied up the high resolution pages that make use of the free zoomify viewer (I’d forgotten to add the Google code to these pages!!)
- Center of map
- Roman mints
- Roman mints map
To come within this section:
- Enhanced biographical data
- Thumbnail images of most recently recorded coins
- Scrolling image carousel to aid identifications
- Later Roman emperors
- Check the code for validity
This section is far and away our most popular area of our site. Google Analytics, shows that the average weekly traffic to our website is 10-15% of our total and visitors look at over 30 pages and have an average visit length of 15 minutes. It’s now the top ranked tool for coin identification on Google.
In terms of new features, I’ve added Google’s Cooperative search to our site. It seems to work quite well and indexes the following sites (seems to be quite comprehensive):
- finds.org.uk
- pastexplorers.org.uk
- findsdatabase.org.uk