Roman Republican Coins Database

Our presentation will be on the Roman Republican Coins Database being developed at the Center for Electronic Texts in the Humanities at the Rutgers University Libraries. This project uses open source software: MySQL, PHP, locally written scripts in Perl and is hosted on a Linux server. MySQL is the most popular open source database software and PHP is a server side scripting language which enables us to provide an interactive web site for the presentation of the coins. We will talk about the development of the project: how it was conceived, why we chose open source software, how the project developed and where it is today. Features of the database include: a glossary of terms, a help screen, coin and issue information and a full-text search engine using Glimpse. The coin images are presented in DJVU format which allows the user to examine closely the obverse and reverse of the coins by magnifying the images and flipping them over. The presenters will demonstrate the database which is web accessible but currently password protected. The password will be removed when the whole of the collection of the coins is available in the database.