Abstract

The current lecture focuses on the concepts developed by the Ancient Coins Counterfeits Scientific Network for the prevention of a dangerous phenomenon. The spread of counterfeits of ancient numismatic items presents a multifaceted issue that results in historical, social, legal and identity distortions of hard-to-predict mass and consequences.

The presentation elaborates on the challenges the ACCSN team encountered while working on innovative digital concepts as the digitisation of numismatic objects identified as non-original, in the specialised scientific collection of the Coin cabinet of the Royal Library of Belgium, and scientifically presenting them alongside originals entered in Corpus Nummorum platform, adhering to the FAIR principles and the LOD concept. A further task involves processing and publishing the counterfeit info cards collection, “The Callataÿ’s file of counterfeit Greek coins”, as linked open data and digital heritage objects. As the cards are approached as multimodal sources, the process included implementing language model processing, Tesseract OCR, as well as image recognition. The examples clearly reveal both the limitations and the potential of the digital research environment and methods.