Groundbreaking Information System Sheds Light On The Past

This torosarus skull, now part of the collection of the Yale Peabody Museum, was found at Lightning Creek in Wyoming in 1891 by American paleontologist John Bell Hatcher. A few years later, Hatcher would go fossil hunting in Patagonia and write a book about that expedition that would be published in 1903. Even with his success at the time, he may not have predicted that his star in paleontology would rise to the point where, in 2018, author and fellow paleontologist Lowell Dingus would publish a book about him called King of the Dinosaur Hunters. 

The photograph and the facts in the above paragraph were gathered in a matter of seconds thanks to LUX, Yale’s new online platform that allows anyone to search the university’s vast collection of books, art, artifacts, and other materials spread across its museums, archives, and libraries. In a major 21st-century step over the card catalogs and databases of the past, the entries in the system aren’t ordered and siloed, but linked laterally to one another in multiple ways that, in total, create a web of connections, so that ​“rather than just doing search after search after search,” said Robert Sanderson, senior director for digital cultural heritage at Yale’s Collections and Scholarly Communications office, ​“you click and find yourself in another rabbit hole,” exploring thread after thread.

LUX is, first and foremost, a triumph of information management in the way that it has organized the sprawling collections of the Yale University Library — which alone ​“has one of the largest research collections in North America,” Sanderson said — Yale University Art Gallery, Yale Center for British Art, and Yale Peabody Museum into a single usable system.

“We realized that everything was connected,” Sanderson said. ​“Not just people to other people, but also works to people and places.” Starting from a fossil in the Peabody collection might lead to finding letters the paleontologist wrote to a colleague, who might turn out to be an artist. The idea behind LUX was to allow researchers to find those connections much more easily. LUX also reaches out beyond the Yale system to various open-source information networks, so ​“it’s not just what we know at Yale; it’s what we can find,” Sanderson said. LUX currently encompasses about 41,000,000 records, including 17,012,680 objects and 13,122,257 works, covering 5,677,302 people and groups, 586,814 places, 4,910,154 concepts, and 38,208 events.

For researchers, Sanderson said, ​“we think this is game-changing. No one else has done this at this sort of scale.”

The idea to develop LUX began about five years ago, said Susan Gibbons, vice provost for Collections and Scholarly Communications. ​“What we kept seeing were lost opportunities, where a student engaged with one piece of the collection and didn’t realize all the other connections that there were.” She cited an example of medical students who were interested in folk medicine coming to YUAG to look at prints by a contemporary artist of medicinal plants. 

“Turns out that same artist did a collection of 13” prints, Gibbons said. Six were at YUAG. The other seven were at YCBA. The students didn’t know because YUAG’s and YCBA’s catalogs weren’t connected, so they only got at half the images they could have. Moreover, Gibbons said, ​“if you read about the artist, you find out that the artists was inspired to create these images based on reading the diaries of a Jamaican slaveholder. Those diaries are at the Beinecke, and they list all those plants. And then the specimens of the plants themselves? They’re in the Peabody.” The students ​“could have had this very rich experience, and all they did was see one bit.” Because the information across Yale’s holdings didn’t ​“speak to each other, that was all they were capable of doing. And it’s just a few human beings who could have known the rest of the connections.”

“It started with frustration” that the lack of connections meant the collection wasn’t being used to its fullest, Gibbons said. But as the LUX team considered solutions, they realized that what they were creating ​“could help scholars all over.”

Finding and developing the right platform for LUX took a long time. It helped that LUX didn’t disrupt the institutions’ individual catalog and data systems; it only required that those institutions provide LUX with data about what they had. This means that other institutions — such as Yale’s collection of musical instruments (staying within Yale) or, for that matter, institutions at other universities and research facilities — could be added in the future as well. LUX’s expanding capabilities open the door to greater means of preserving rare books, art, and artifacts while also digitally allowing the public greater access to them.

LUX has been online for a little over a month and has already started to see traffic — and a lot of positive feedback from researchers regarding its ease of use. In some cases, ​“people are checking themselves,” Sanderson said, akin to people Googling themselves. In a few cases, people have written to correct biographical information. People have also used LUX to search for their families. ​“Someone found a photo of their grandfather in the archives,” Sanderson said, and wrote to say they had even more pictures if Yale was interested. Others are already testing the boundaries of what’s in the collection; Sanderson has noticed a trend of people looking for digital files of some of Yale’s architecture; they’re not just interested in the YCBA’s collection, but in the YCBA building itself, designed by celebrated architect Louis Kahn. 

Gibbons said that, at the institutional level, other universities are interested in replicating LUX for their own collections. Yale is eager to share code with them to help them design their own systems. ​“We’re expecting to see other institutions following along,” Gibbons said. ​“Once they do that, we can link them all together.” Yale’s and, say, Oxford’s collections could be digitally combined, making even more materials accessible to the public. It’s all fodder for Gibbons and Sanderson in deciding how to continue to expand what’s available on LUX. 

To answer the question of how LUX might transform research at Yale, however, ​“we have to wait until the kids come back,” Gibbons said.

LUX is already, however, a powerful tool for an unvarnished look into the past. This reporter searched under the broad topic of slavery. LUX pulled up 13,668 objects I could look at. In addition to voluminous books and journal articles were heaps of primary sources, including pamphlets from the worldwide abolitionist movement. In the Peabody’s collection of artifacts are some of the tools of that terrible trade: whips from from what is now Democratic Republic of Congo, an ankle shackle. A sound archive contained shout songs. There were also reminders that the centuries-long enslavement of Black people was the last phase of an institution that was, farther back in history, even more widespread. In the Peabody’s collection of Babylonian tablets, many of them record the sales of people. And finally, bringing it home, there is the painting in the YCBA’s collection by John Verelst that appears in LUX as ​“Elihu Yale with Members of his Family and an Enslaved Child.”

LUX ​“brings greater transparency to the collection,” Gibbons said. It has been there for a long time, but previously ​“you had to know where to go to find it.” Now, ​“everything is there” at people’s fingertips. In addition to confronting the written works, art, and artifacts as evidence of the most painful chapters in history, the LUX crew has started a side project about the ​“metadata,” Gibbons said, or ​“how we describe collections.” 

The Verelst painting is a near-perfect test case. ​“In the record, you can see how we described it over time,” Gibbons said. Early descriptions of the painting in the records don’t even mention the enslaved boy. ​“Whereas modern day, we’re trying to figure out what his name was, and doing the research to give everyone a name,” Gibbons said.

Generally, she said, ​“we’ve been describing collections for hundreds of years, and as a result, you can find biases and racism in our own words of how we describe a collection, because that was what you would use at the time,” Gibbons said. Given that these past biases are all too apparent today, the project seeks ​“to understand our own biases over time that have influenced how we describe our collection,” in the hopes of doing better in the present and the future. ​“And then there’s the question of where these objects came from,” as some were acquired in the past under dubious circumstances. In the provenance data for objects in LUX, ​“we can increasingly be very transparent” in explaining how an object came into Yale’s hands. ​“Where we see a gap, that’s where we can do some research. So it’s helping us, and it also invites the world to take a look and ask questions of us.… Showing it all to the world causes a dialogue to start.”

“We’re inviting it,” Gibbons added. ​“It’s difficult, but we have an obligation to invite those conversations.”

The step into greater transparency along with continuing advances in digital technology, writ larger, hints at the way in which LUX could be ​“game-changing” in the way that Sanderson alluded to. Within Yale’s collection, many of the objects in it — from fossils to manuscripts to delicate artworks and sound recordings — are rare and fragile. The old magnetic tape that has an important musical performance on it may only be able to play once before it breaks. Digitization, from audio recordings to detailed 3D replicas of sculptures and dinosaur bones, offer a way to keep the original objects preserved while also making them all available virtually. Researchers should perhaps not climb inside the actual skull of a triceratops to get a look at the inside of its jaw, but could take that trip easily on a screen, zooming in as close as they would want on any detail they like. Then, that other universities across the world are already interested in creating something like LUX for themselves, and then perhaps linking with LUX, holds out the possibility of mind-boggling amounts of digitized material being made available to the public in the forseeable future.

“As the technology for rendering 3D matures — and it’s getting there — how do we leverage those advances to give greater access, to improve research and access to information?” Sanderson asked. The LUX team is among those trying to find the answers to those questions, and in so doing, giving researchers, and for that matter, the curious public, more ways to understand the world around them and how it got that way.

Explore LUX here.