This article examines the historical development, scholarly significance, and digital transformation of university coin collections in Europe, with particular focus on the international Network of Academic Coin Collections (NUMiD). Situating academic numismatic collections within the broader history of university collections and research infrastructures, the study argues that coin collections have played a central role in the emergence of modern historical and archaeological scholarship from the early modern period to the present. Coins, as materially dense and highly standardized historical objects, fostered methodological traditions of autopsy, classification, contextualization, and comparative analysis that profoundly shaped the historical sciences. The article reconstructs the evolution of university coin collections from the seventeenth century onward, tracing their origins in princely donations, private scholarly collections, secularized ecclesiastical holdings, and archaeological discoveries. It highlights their dual role as research infrastructures and pedagogical tools, emphasizing their importance for disciplines such as ancient history, archaeology, Byzantine studies, Islamic studies, and the history of religion. Particular attention is devoted to the diversity of collection histories, institutional settings, and scholarly traditions across Europe, as well as to the long-term entanglement of university collections with museums, libraries, archives, and archaeological services. The second half of the article focuses on the digital transformation of academic numismatics through NUMiD and its cooperation with the Berlin Coin Cabinet and the international ikmk.net infrastructure. The study analyzes how collaborative digitization strategies, shared authority data, semantic web technologies, and interoperable metadata standards have reshaped collection management, research practices, and teaching. It demonstrates that large-scale interconnected datasets enable new forms of numismatic scholarship, including transinstitutional research, machine-readable data integration, and digitally enhanced teaching environments. At the same time, the article stresses that successful digitization depends fundamentally on local scholarly expertise and sustained engagement with original objects. By combining perspectives from the history of science, material culture studies, digital humanities, and collection history, the article presents university coin collections not merely as repositories of objects but as dynamic epistemic infrastructures that continue to shape research, teaching, and scholarly communication in the digital age.
Johannes Wienand (Mon,) studied this question.