The American Numismatic Society has been chosen as one of ten publishers
to participate in
Humanities Open Book project, a joint
NEH-
Mellon Foundation grant program to convert out-of-print books of enduring
scholarship into EPUB e-books licensed to allow readers to search and
download these books freely, and to read them on any type of e-reader.
The ANS is the only learned society to receive funding for this
initiative.
“The large number of valuable scholarly books in the
humanities that have fallen out of print in recent decades represents a
huge untapped resource,” said NEH Chairman William Adams. “By placing
these works into the hands of the public we hope that the Humanities
Open Book program will widen access to the important ideas and
information they contain and inspire readers, teachers and students to
use these books in exciting new ways.”
ANS publications date back
to 1866 and include over 500 volumes of numismatic scholarship. Thanks
to the funding received from the Mellon Foundation, nearly 100 of its
rarest out-of-print books will be converted into free EPUB digital
editions. The ANS will go one step further by
TEI-encoding these
editions for online viewing, searching, and linking. Following
best-practices of
Linked Open Data (LOD), these XML files will link to
(and will be able to be linked from) other Open Access (OA) resources in
the Humanities, benefiting researchers in history, archaeology, art
history, geography, and other disciplines.
“Scholars in the
humanities are making increasing use of digital media to access
evidence, produce new scholarship, and reach audiences that increasingly
rely on such media for information to understand and interpret the
world in which they live,” said Earl Lewis, President of the Andrew W.
Mellon Foundation.
“Knowledge wants to be free,” Andrew
Reinhard, ANS Director of Publications said. “This grant will help the
ANS put even more of its collections online for free and open access for
anyone who wants it.” The ANS continues its ongoing, longtime
commitment to digitization and databases having placed over 600,000
objects online—more than 100,000 of which have been photographed—while
contributing tens of thousands of coin records via international
projects such as Online Coins of the Roman Empire (OCRE) and PELLA:
Coinage of the Macedonian kings of the Argead dynasty. Thanks to the
Mellon grant, the ANS can continue to add its publications to this suite
of OA materials.
Ethan Gruber, the ANS’s Director of Data
Science, said “this is an important project that will enable us to
further integrate our numismatic collection, archival materials, and
digital library into a cohesive platform to further not only the study
of coins, but also the study of the evolution of numismatics.”
“On
behalf of the Trustees and staff of the Society, I would like to thank
the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for their generous support of this
exciting project,” Ute Wartenberg Kagan, Executive Director of the ANS,
said.
The Mellon-funded EPUB and TEI-encoded publications will be available by the end of 2016.
For more information, contact Andrew Reinhard, Director of Publications, at
arei...@numismatics.org.
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The full list of works to be made publicly accessible as EBooks through this program is available at
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B0qn_O39OBdmZXZiVjdJZ2pDQjg/view?usp=sharing. Numismatic books from Greek, Roman, and Byzantine periods are significantly represented.