The William Conte Collection

Within the Coins and Medals collection of the Fitzwilliam Museum at the University of Cambridge, the William Conte Collection consists of Norman and Angevin coins dating from 1066 to 1279, each of which has been digitized, the images placed within the museum's impressive OPAC.

1. Selection Decisions
The coins come from the collection of William Conte, a leading authority on Norman coinage, purchased by the Fitzwilliam through national grants. The collection contains many unique and very rare coins, and the entire collection was digitized as it was entered into the collection. Together, the collection seems to be one of the most complete, and is considered to be of great condition and relative completion. Given the Fitzwilliam's funding, I don't imagine there was much debate about digitizing it in its entirety.

2. Metadata
This is where the collection really shines. The coins have been integrated into the online catalog of the museum, and as you can see, each object has an impressive number of access points for search. Ruler, state, mint, denomination, materials, and period can all be searched for. And once found, for each coin there is provenance, dimensions, a full physical description including marks, etc, and both an accession and reference number. The online catalog at the Fitzwilliam seems impressively well designed and meticulous.

3. Object Characteristics
The scans of the coins themselves show both obverse and reverse. They appear in three sizes. When a search is displayed by image results, smaller thumbnails are used. The coin's entry itself has a medium sized image that can then be clicked through to a larger image. The largest image is not incredibly high-resolution, but seems large enough for casual study and perhaps some scholarship based solely on composition and marks.

4. Audience
While I think the primary intended audience is eventual users of the museum, and the digitizations are meant to serve as a reference for those who would go on to observe the object itself, the digitizations seem very useful in themselves. They are detailed enough, and supported by enough metadata that I could easily imagine a scholarly interest being satisfied without having to move on to the physical objects themselves.