Enfilade

As announced earlier this summer, from Yale News:

Mike Cummings, “17 Million Reasons to Love ‘LUX,’ Yale’s New Collections Search Tool,” Yale News (1 June 2023). Yale introduces LUX, a groundbreaking custom search tool for exploring the university’s unparalleled holdings of artistic, cultural, and scientific objects.

Yale University’s museums, libraries, and archives contain vast troves of cultural and scientific heritage that fire curiosity and fuel research worldwide. Now there’s a simple new way to make astonishing connections among millions of objects.

Starting today, anyone can explore the university’s unparalleled holdings online through LUX: Yale Collections Discovery—a groundbreaking discovery and research platform that provides single-point access to more than 17 million items, including defining specimens of dinosaur fossils, illuminated medieval manuscripts, paintings by Vincent van Gogh and J. M. W. Turner, and the archives of Langston Hughes, Gertrude Stein, and other renowned literary figures.

Free and easy to use, the platform—a powerful kind of database that maps relationships—helps users find clear pathways through the collections and uncover links between objects that might otherwise seem unconnected, such as a fish fossil and an 18th-century sketch of a young woman. Previously there was no easy way to search multiple collections at once or discern associations among the objects within them.

Developed by Yale over the past five years, LUX encompasses the collections of the Yale Center for British Art (YCBA), the Yale University Art Gallery, the Yale Peabody Museum, and Yale University Library, which includes the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, the Lewis Walpole Library, and specialized collections devoted to the arts, music, film, history of medicine, and religion. The Mellon Foundation, the nation’s largest funder of the arts and humanities, funded key aspects of the project and was instrumental in its completion. . . .

Ayesha Ramachandran, associate professor of comparative literature in Yale’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences, has experimented with LUX, and calls it a “terrific tool” for teaching and conducting research.

“I was struck by the way LUX is constructed to be a tool of exploration and not just a database,” Ramachandran said. “It is extremely intuitive and conceptually organized to allow you to drill down to learn more about the object of your search.”