Old Money was conceived, planned, and managed by Bert Lott, Assistant Professor of Classics at Vassar College. However the project was, in the best of all possible ways, a collaboration among faculty, students, computing professionals, and museum curators.

Old Money began as a project supported by a Mellon Grant to Vassar College to explore the interactions of new technologies and liberal arts pedagogy; a generous grant from the Robert Lehman Foundation supported the project from 1999-2001; the web site and database took final shape in the summer of 2001 during the summer institute of the Media Studies Development Project at Vassar. Discussion, design, and implementation occurred in the new Media Cloisters in the Thompson Library on the Vassar campus.

Vassar's new cross-disciplinary image database, from which Old Money is the first project--for good and ill--to benefit, was conceived as part of the Mellon Grant. It has been several years in the making, but its successful and impressive completion not only justifies the energy and time of so many who had a hand in it, but also places Vassar in the enviable position among liberal arts colleges of possessing a tool to implement a new media and new technologies strategy in a coherent cross-disciplinary way.

The following persons deserve special mention:

• Three student research assistants worked on the project. NATHAN HENSLEY (Vassar, '00) began the task of helping me identify the roughly 1500 unidentified coins in the collection. Supported Vassar's Ford Scholars program, SARAH LOWMAN (Vassar, '02), continued the work in the summer of 2001. During the School years of 2000-2001 and 2001-2002, KRISTIN GRAEPER (Vassar, '02) worked to photography, identify, and enter coins.

• IVY LEE,a media studies student woker, coded the HTML portions of the website in the Media Cloisters over the summer of 2001.

• JASPER LONG, multimedia consultant and co-curator of the Media Cloisters, assisted in technical and aesthetic matters.

• The image database was developed by DAVID SUSMAN, web manager, and JUDY HUSTED, web programmer, from CIS.

• JOANNE POTTER, registrar for the FLLAC, went beyond the call of duty to ensure that we always had ready access to the coins themselves.

Generous financial support from the following groups has enabled the creation of Old Money.

• The Robert Lehman Foundation
• The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation
• The Media Studies Development Project at Vassar College
• The Department of Classics at Vassar College
• The Ford Scholars Program at Vassar College