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Yale offers free online access to its collections


Yale has digitized about 250,000 items so far.

Yale University announced May 10 that it will offer free online access to digital images of millions of objects housed in its museums, archives and libraries, and the school said it’s the first Ivy League university to make its collections accessible that way.

No license will be required for the transmission of the images and no limitations will be imposed on their use, which will allow scholars, artists and others around the world to use Yale collections for study, publication, teaching and inspiration, Yale said.

It will take many years for the university to digitize all its objects.

The school has harvested 1.5 million records from all its catalogs and digitized 250,000 of them, which are available through a newly developed collective catalog.

Yale expects the 1.5 million records to grow much larger as it continues to harvest its catalogs.

Images now accessible under the new policy include pictures of the war bonnet of Sioux chief “Red Cloud,” a Mozart sonata in the composer’s own hand and a 15th-century Javanese gold kris, or dagger, handle.

Yale says its collections are among the strongest in depth and breadth of any academic institution in the world, ranging from anthropology to vertebrate zoology and including world-renowned art collections from antiquity to the present.

“That Yale has achieved the goal of making its collections available online to students, scholars, and the general public, in a free and open-access environment, is a splendid achievement that we hope will inspire other colleges and universities internationally to follow suit,” said Amy Meyers, director of the Yale Center for British Art. “The ability to publish images directly from our online catalogues without charge will encourage the increased use of our collections for scholarship, a benefit to which we look forward with the greatest excitement.”

Researchers will be able to examine individual items online in detail and compare objects from different collections side by side.

“High costs of reproduction rights have traditionally limited the ability of scholars, especially ones early in their careers, to publish richly illustrated books and articles in the history of art, architecture, and material and visual culture,” according to Mariet Westermann, vice president of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. “Yale’s new policy provides an important model to follow.”

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