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

"Scholars, artists and other individuals around the world will enjoy free access to online images of millions of objects housed in Yale's museums, archives, and libraries thanks to a new "Open Access" policy that the University announced today. Yale is the first Ivy League university to make its collections accessible in this fashion, and already more than 250,000 images are available through a newly developed collective catalog....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...."The open access policy allows us to more fully harness the potential of digital and networked technologies in service to scholarship as well as to creative use and reuse of our rich cultural heritage. It frees us to concentrate on our core mission to create, preserve, and disseminate knowledge in digital form," said Meg Bellinger, director of the Yale Office of Digital Assets and Infrastructure (ODAI), which developed and will support the implementation of the initiative...."