| In 1954 two eminent scholars, Philip Grierson, a British historian, numismatist and collector, and Alfred R. Bellinger (1892–1978), professor of Latin at Yale University and a distinguished American numismatist (photos right), were invited to advise Dumbarton Oaks on how these two collections could best be used for scholarly purposes. They recommended that the Dumbarton Oaks collection be limited to Byzantine coins and that it should be built up as rapidly as possible into one of world-class quality. It was also decided to catalogue and publish the Dumbarton Oaks and Whittemore collections as a unit.
The honorary post of Advisor in Byzantine Numismatics was created for Grierson, with the duty of expanding the collection and in due course, in collaboration with Bellinger, of undertaking its publication. This was to take the form of a series of catalogues (Catalogue of the Byzantine Coins in the Dumbarton Oaks Collection and the Whittemore Collection), customarily abbreviated as DOC, running from the emergence of "Byzantine" coinage under Anastasius I (491–518) to the fall of the Empire in 1453.
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