Digital Images of Yale’s Vast Cultural Collections Now Available for Free

Yale University has announced a new open access policy whereby it will allow free access to online images of a very large number of objects from Yale's museums, archives, and libraries. Already more than 250,000 images are available through Yale's Cross Collection Discovery catalog. Click for a slide show of some digitized images from the collection.

Excerpt from the Yale Daily Bulletin (10 May, 2011):

The goal of the new policy is to make high quality digital images of Yale's vast cultural heritage collections in the public domain openly and freely available.

As works in these collections become digitized, the museums and libraries will make those images that are in the public domain freely accessible. In a departure from established convention, no license will be required for the transmission of the images and no limitations will be imposed on their use. The result is that scholars, artists, students, and citizens the world over will be able to use these collections for study, publication, teaching and inspiration.

"With this pioneering open access policy, Yale reminds us that with any great academic collection comes a great responsibility: to share our cultural heritage openly in order to advance scholarship not only on campus but around the world. Yale has set a new standard by which we should measure our colleges' and universities' commitment to scholarship," noted Max Marmor, president of the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, which encourages teaching, learning and scholarship in the history of art.