ANS gets funding for digital project
The digitization project for the American Numismatic Society’s back list of monographs has gained funding from by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The financial support jointly from the National Endowment…
The digitization project for the American Numismatic Society’s back list of monographs has gained funding from by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
The financial support jointly from the National Endowment for the Humanities-Mellon Humanities Open Book Program.
All of the ANS’s book-length publications through 2010 will be made available for free online for anyone to use.
The ANS will convert its remaining scanned books into TEI XML, which will allow for instant generation of e-books as well as Internet-friendly text that both contains and encourages links to other content online: related people, places and events.
“Numismatics is uniquely placed in between history, archaeology, economics, art history, geography and other disciplines,” Andrew Reinhard, Director of Publications for the ANS, said.
“By encoding these books and making them available as Open Access, scholars and hobbyists alike can exploit the true interdisciplinary nature of numismatic data for their own work, finding content and making connections that would otherwise be hidden.”
The ANS is one of the United States’ oldest academic publishers, producing printed scholarship since 1866, pre-dating storied university presses such as Johns Hopkins University (1878), the University of Pennsylvania (1890), and the University of Chicago (1891).
The ANS said it continues to lead the way with digital scholarly publications, something it could not have done without the support of the Mellon Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities.
This is the second year the ANS has received Mellon funding for the project, and will conclude the work begun in 2016. In 2016, the Humanities Open Book Program selected 10 academic publishers to convert their 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. In 2017, eight grants were awarded.
“Academic and non-academic researchers increasingly use the Internet as a source of information and a vehicle for disseminating the results of their work,” said Earl Lewis, President of The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
For more information, visit www.numismatics.org.
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