Over the last few days, some substantial upgrades have occurred behind the scenes of the Scheme’s IT. Our original database suppliers, Oxford Archdigital, were liquidated and bought for certain aspects of their porfolio by a GIS company called Clarinet as stated below:
Clarinet Systems has bought the intellectual property of Oxford Archdigital Limited. Clarinet specialises in GIS and electronic publishing and has worked with some of the largest corporations in the USA, Europe, Japan and United Kingdom over the last 20 years. See www.clarinet.co.uk
We are currently in discussion with their new owners to see what level of service they can provide us with. At the moment, I am supporting the ToadHMS system and trying to fix several bugs. We have taken the opportunity to move our hardware to Dedipower’s co location server rack with a different level of service for server maintenance and we will be upgrading server space when time allows. Therefore if the servers go offline, we’re upgrading.
However, more importantly, several areas of the site have seen significant changes as well. The Roman coins guide is now nearing completion after Natalia Bauer scanned every single issuer of Roman coinage from Augustus to the early 5th century AD and wrote short bios of each of them! I’ve also introduced a breadcrumb trail into the coins guide to make it easier to return to the start and a carousel of images will be up shortly and also a relational view of inscriptions to emperors and reverse types to denoms and issuers. Good stuff from Sam and Ian!
Lastly, we’ve decided to leverage flickr’s interface a bit more and we now have a pro account with them and a wide array of our photos are now appearing on there. I’ve also got them appearing on our front page in the right hand panel. If you would like to join the portable antiquities group on there and add any of your own photos, that would be excellent!
