Breaking digital silos to share cultural heritage collections
The LUX search tool, which facilitates research across Yale’s collections, now can be replicated by cultural heritage institutions worldwide.
In 2023, Yale launched LUX: Yale Collections Discovery, a groundbreaking research platform that allows people to search across the university’s vast museum, library, and archival collections from their laptops.
Now the data framework behind LUX has been made available to any cultural heritage institution worldwide seeking to make its collections more open to researchers and the public.
On Feb.19, Linked Art, a community of museum and cultural heritage professionals devoted to making museum collections more discoverable and accessible, released the Linked Art 1.0 specifications, a standard method to share and connect information about these collections.
Yale, which is one of 25 institutional members of the Linked Art collaboration, implemented Linked Art 1.0 in creating LUX, which allows single-point access to more than 17 million objects in the university’s collections.
“This is an exciting moment for the cultural heritage sector,” said Robert Sanderson, senior director for digital cultural heritage at Yale and co-chair of Linked Art’s editorial board. “Linked Art 1.0 is poised to revolutionize how museums and other cultural heritage institutions manage and share knowledge about the objects in their collections.
“Our success at Yale in building LUX would not have been possible without the hard work of the Linked Art community over the past seven years.”
Linked Art 1.0 is not software. Rather, it is a standard model for describing cultural heritage objects and associated knowledge that ensures consistency of meaning. It also includes a standard web application programming interface (API) that allows a museum’s digital systems to interact intuitively with that knowledge.
By implementing these standards, cultural heritage institutions can join a network of cultural heritage collections through which researchers can make connections between objects in collections across institutions, explained Sanderson, who helped develop the specifications and API.
Other institutions that have implemented Linked Art 1.0 include the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, The National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, making tens of millions of objects searchable by users worldwide.
Prior to the introduction of LUX, researchers working in Yale’s collections needed to visit the websites of the individual campus repositories to search their collections. For example, a search on Yale University Library’s website would not return related items housed at the Yale University Art Gallery and vice vera. With LUX, a single search produces relevant items from all campus collections.
The release of Linked Art 1.0 could create a network of cultural heritage institutions wherein a search on one museum’s search platform could return results from other institutions within the network.
For example, Van Gogh Worldwide — a free digital platform that provides information on the works of Vincent van Gogh — relies on Linked Art 1.0 to allow users to search for paintings by the Dutch artist housed at institutions across the globe.
Museum exhibitions often feature web-based tools that allow visitors to search digital records of artworks on view at that institution but usually need to exclude records for works on loan from other institutions that use different methods for describing collections online. Linked Art 1.0 removes that barrier by allowing museums that have implemented them to easily share digital records with each other, Sanderson said.
“Linked Art represents a transformative step forward for the National Gallery’s digital strategy, enabling us to bring our world-class collection to audiences in ways that were previously unimaginable,” said Nick Sharp, chief digital officer at the National Gallery of Art.
“By leveraging the Linked Art open standard, we’re not just enhancing the discoverability of our collection — we’re fundamentally rethinking how we connect artworks, artists, and exhibitions across time and place.”
692
