icons

[elton barker]

Dear all,

A while ago, I posed the question of using icons in order to provide users at a glance an indication of what was in the collections that one could now link to.

Thanks to the sterling efforts of so many of you and, of course, the unbelievably productive Rainer, the new Pelagios API has made this now imperative. As a user, when I'm faced by a (long) list of potential fascinating sources, I'm not going to be able to tell from the name alone what each source might contain. *I* know, of course, the great treasures Arachne, ANS, CLAROS, Fasti, Google Ancient Places, Squinchpix, etc. etc., hold within them, but as a Jo(sephine) Bloggs, the Pelagios newbie, I'm not going to know and I'm probably not going to care.

So, here we are back to the icon question...

The Pelagios team were in (frenzied) discussion yesterday regarding not only what kind of icons we as a network could possibly use, but also how we would be better using them. In the end, we settled on thinking about icons as "tags" for your data, since no one icon could adequately sum up a partners' dataset, and, moreover, it didn't have to: using more than one icon is perfectly ok practice.

Below you'll find a rudimentary list of "tag icons" and, underneath that, a table of partners with these tag icons applied. Please take a moment to have a quick look and get back to us with any comments. Once we've firmed up on this list, we'll start looking for appropriate icons. Rainer has suggested using icons from a font set such as:

http://fontello.com/

because then the icons can be easily coloured, have text effects applied to them, there's no problem with making icon background transparent, etc.

Looking forward to your help in this!

cheers

elton

Tag icon list

texts (-> literary, epigraphic, papyrological, "tables" (Ptolemy), etc.)

archaeology (-> sites, artefacts)

numismatics

maps

images (-> photos, drawings)

scholarship

gazetteer (-> will be separate in the new API, I think)

Pelagios partners                                                Type (tags)

Aerial Photographic Archive for Archaeology in the ME Flickr collection	images
American Numismatic Society	coins
Ancient History Encyclopedia	encyclopaedia
Ancient World Mapping Center	gazetteer
ANS, OCRE, Fralin/UVa Numismatics	coins
Arachne	archaeology, texts, images
Book of the Dead Project	archaeology, texts, images
CLAROS	archaeology, texts, images
Coin Hoards of the Roman Republic	coins
Dickinson College Commentaries	texts
Digital Atlas of the Roman Empire	gazetteer
Epigraphic Database Heidelberg	texts
Epigraphic DB Heidelberg	texts
Fasti Online	archaeology
Google Ancient Places	texts
ISAW Papers	scholarship
Meketre	images
Nomisma.org	coins
Omnes Viae	gazetteer
Online Coins of the Roman Empire	coins
Open Context	archaeology
ORACC	texts
ORBIS	gazetteer
Palestine Exploration Fund Flickr collection	images
Papyri.info	texts
Perseus Digital Library	texts
Personal Flickr collections	images
Portable Antiquities Scheme	archaeology
Sharing Ancient Wisdoms	texts
SPQR	texts
SquinchPix	images
Ure Museum	archaeology
Vici.org	gazetteer