LONDON.- As part of the programme to make the entire collection of eight million objects accessible online, documentation assistants are undertaking painstaking work to go through the collection.

They are checking they are recorded correctly and an entry is created on the Museum's Collection online catalogue which is accessible to the public.

The work, supported by the Headley Trust, is bringing new discoveries to the surface and helping the teams learn more about the collection than ever before.

In the British Museum's Money and Medals department, rare 17th-century copper Mughal coins have been documented. The collection of Mughal coins is from the reign of Jahangir, the fourth Mughal emperor from 1605–1627. Coinage from his reign is unusual because some were issued with pictorial designs, a major break with Islamic tradition, including figural representations of the zodiac signs of the month they were minted in.

The Museum collection of Mughal coins was the first Asian series to receive a modern catalogue, by Stanley Lane-Poole in 1892. However, it omitted the lower value denominations in copper, in favour of silver and gold coins.

The apparent absence of copper coinage from Jahangir's reign onwards in the British Museum collection, because of that catalogue, created a perception that it had disappeared, or was extremely rare at the height of the Mughal Empire. This has shaped the modern interpretation of India's economic history.

Scholars believed the numbers in the catalogue reflected production and that the empire must have conducted a major switch to silver currency. Copper coinage, which would have been small change, would be expected to be the most used and widespread type of coins.

This perception has impacted the understanding people had of how those at the poorer end of society interacted with the empire and how far the money permeated economic strata. It falsely suggests that the economy that existed was narrow and functioned for the benefit of only the wealthiest parts of society.

Images of more than 1,300 coins relating to Jahangir are now available to view on Collection online of which 129 are copper and copper alloy. Some of these coins have been in the collection since the time of Lane-Poole's catalogue which was inevitably only a selection.

Documenting these coins and making them available to all researchers is key to bridging the gap between these details of numismatic data and significant changes in the early-modern world.

The research that can now be carried out on these coins will tell us more about India's economy, political power and colonial legacy.

The documentation and digitisation programme has also helped us learn more about people's collecting habits. Today the focus is on having complete sets of the twelve zodiac coins (the British Museum has three). Examination of 19th century silver plated imitations in the collection suggests people in the past wanted individual signs, perhaps with personal meaning. It's possible that the focus on sets was a byproduct of museum collecting processes itself.

The Money and Medals team has also faced the mammoth task of digitising the remaining 17,000 previously undocumented coins that form part of the Cunetio Hoard, Britain's largest hoard of Roman coins at just under 55,000 objects. Work to record this is nearly complete.

The team has added the correct weight and diameter measurements for each coin, and added a catalogue reference for use by researchers. New coin types have also been recorded, adding to our understanding of Roman coinage.

These will be available to search on the Collection online website in the coming months.

The team has also improved the cataloguing of significant British early medieval coinage collections, including the coinage of Alfred the Great and Edward the Confessor.

The work has encompassed Anglo-Saxon material ranging from the early Sceatta, through the Viking invasions, to the Norman Conquest. It has included ensuring the accuracy of key data, such as location and dimensions, and creating new records for objects previously missed.
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Tom Hockenhull, Keeper of Money and Medals at the British Museum, said: 'Digitisation of the collection commenced more than forty years ago. It has been the single largest and longest project in the Museum's history and a monumental undertaking, testament to the size and complexity of the collections. It's not always been smooth progress, and at times it has felt desperately slow, but at last, thanks to a generous grant from the Headley Trust, it feels like we can finally say we are on the home straight. The Museum's documentation and digitisation programme is an unprecedented undertaking that will have a profound and lasting impact on scholarship.

'These coins are just one example of how it is enabling us to draw more information from the collection, and how that information can shape people's understanding of history. Thanks to the Headley Trust, we can continue to learn more and share it with the world.'

Robert Bracey, Curator of Asian Collections at the British Museum, said: 'I always knew the British Museum collection of Mughal coins was significantly larger than people believed, that the catalogues did not accurately reflect it, but I couldn't have quantified the scale.

'As public data sets like this expand, I can begin to answer questions that at one time it didn't even occur to me to ask. Core historical research begins with this kind of process. Listing, counting, and photographing, is exactly how I would go about trying to better understand these coins. There is a synergy between the documentation and digitisation project and the way researchers discover and expand our understanding about history.'

Sir Timothy Sainsbury said: 'The Headley Trust is delighted that its grant will enable the British Museum to complete the vital work of documenting and digitising its collections.

'This will give worldwide access to the wonderful collections which the Museum holds and will allow them to be seen and appreciated by a global audience.'