Linking from Citation to Example in Numismatic (and other) Scholarship

I let myself follow a tangent today. It starts with noting that the article by C. Lorber and A. Meadows that I'm preparing for publication "Review of Ptolemaic Numismatics" makes frequent reference to coin types described in J. Svoronos, Ta nomismata tou kratous ton Ptolemaion. Athens, 1904-1908. It is an obvious feature of such a publication that those references lead readers to information about those coins.

To start on the journey towards such linking, I created URIs for all coin types defined in Svoronos' typology at nomisma.org. See http://nomisma.org/id/svoronos-1904-1000. There's very little description there, and what is there is cribbed from C. Lorber's translation at http://www.coin.com/images/dr/svoronos_text.html.

Now, if you go to this paragraph in Lorber and Meadows, which makes reference to Svoronos, you'll see that the link to "Sv. 1424" is live. Look towards the end of the paragraph. And note that it's possible to refer to single <p> elements in the article. That's because each one has an @id with a unique value. That's cool and important.

Follow the link to http://nomisma.org/id/svoronos-1904-1424 and you'll see further links to the ANS collection and to coinproject.com. The former is a rock-solid stable URI but the coin hasn't been photographed (hint, hint). The latter is to an interesting project that is digitizing a type corpora for many series of coins. As the editor of ISAW Papers I don't have to worry if it's super-stable. I rely on nomisma.org to provide reasonable links and to keep them current.

The end result is a hint of a richly linked and illustrated future. Again, cool. I'd like to cross-the-bridge (as it were) and deliver images of Sv. 1424 while readers are still within the "environment" of Lorber and Meadows. But the first step is implementing such links, then we can work on the user experience.

In other news.... there is now a github for ISAW Papers at http://github.com/sfsheath/isaw-papers.