Today, in collaboration with the British Museum and the Muenzkabinett of the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, the ANS launches another major new toolto aid in the identification, research and cataloging of the coins of the ancient world.

Coinage of the Roman Republic Online (CRRO) continues the precedent set by Online Coins of the Roman Empire (OCRE) in presenting, inan easily searchable form, all the varieties of the coinage issued in the Roman Republic. Six online collections containing over 20,000 specimens ofRoman Republican coinage spread across 2,300 coin types, in addition to hundreds of hoards from Coin Hoard of the Roman Republic (CHRR) andadditional individual findspots provided by Berlin are now available for research.

The site presents a basic description of each published variety based on Michael Crawford's 1974 publication Roman Republican Coinage(RRC), which remains the primary typology used for the identification of Roman Republican coin types. Since its publication there have beensignificant revisions to the dating of the series following the discovery of new hoards, but no attempt has been made to reflect these, or to makeany other amendments to the published typology at this stage.

The descriptions are based on the typology set out in RRC, but have been modified to meet the standards of the British Museum's collectionmanagement system by Eleanor Ghey and Ian Leins. These were previously published in Ghey and Leins 2010, which forms an update to the 1910 catalogueof the collection by Grueber. Additional types not in the British Museum's collection were added to this database by Richard Witschonke of theANS.

Many of these coin types are linked to specimens present in the British Museum's collection, Muenzkabinett of the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, theANS, and elsewhere, and where available, to images. Searches are made straightforward through a series of facets, presented in a way that willalready be familiar to users of other ANS search tools. Traditional searches of familiar numismatic categories such as obverse and reverse legendsand types are provided, as well as the ability to search by deity, in the hope that CRRO will provide an identification tool useful to collectors,dealers, curators, and field archaeologists. Researchers can now list all coin types found within a country and any regional division below thecountry (E.g., Liguria, down to the town or city).

ANS database developer, Ethan Gruber, says that, "like OCRE and all of our other digital projects at the ANS, CRRO uses Linked Open Datamethodologies to aggregate information from disparate institutions and present the information in an interface available in more than 10 languageswith advanced mapping and metrical analysis features. CRRO is a fully functional research portal for Roman Republican numismatics."

The ANS acknowledges the contribution of Michael Crawford to the project, and also thanks Michael Sharp of Cambridge University Press for allowingus to use the numbering system of Roman Republican Coinage.

To access Coinage of the Roman Republic Online, see:
http://numismatics.org/crro/

To read the complete article, see:
Coinage of the Roman Republic Online: Something for Roman Numismatists to "CRRO" about(http://numismatics.org/NewsEvents/PR20150115CRRO)