Here at the British Museum, a five-year project aiming to make the entire museum’s collection of roughly eight million objects(!) fully accessible online is now well underway. The Documentation and Digitisation project will ensure that every object has an accurate record and an entry in the Museum’s Collection Online catalogue which you can browse at your leisure by clicking here.
In the Money and Medals Department, a team of documentation and imaging assistants are working extremely hard to fully record the department’s collection of around 800,000 objects. The team have almost completed their work on the recording of the Cunetio Hoard, the largest hoard of Roman coins found in Britain. The hoard contains almost 55,000 radiates, base silver coinage that was produced in great numbers during the third century. The coins were placed inside a large ceramic pot which is currently on display at Wilshire Museum Devizes.
As part of our project, we are making a contribution to the documentation of the department’s collection. Many of the hoards in our study are in the museum’s collection and the project team have recently finished working through the thousands of coins from the Hoxne hoard. Now that we have examined each coin and checked that their details are accurately recorded, the coins will be photographed by imaging assistants and every coin will soon be available to view online. The artefacts from the hoard are housed in the Department of British and European Prehistory at the Museum and many of these objects can also be viewed online such as a magnificent body-chain which includes a gold solidus of Gratian (AD 367-83).
