A room with everything in it

Steven Scarpa

Visitors to recently renovated Yale Peabody Museum marvel at the beauty of the improved space and how the collections come alive within it. Recent improvements to the Peabody’s online collections and archives are sure to elicit the same response.  

The newly upgraded Peabody collections portal will give students, academics – indeed anyone looking for a great internet rabbit hole to go down – more information about the objects on display and unprecedented access to the museum’s vast collections. 

“Our digital experience will be as thoughtfully curated as our newly renovated physical gallery space,” said Gary Motz, the Peabody’s Head of Computer Systems who oversaw the project’s data architecture.  

The Peabody’s collection consists of over 14 million objects, ranging from the dynamic dinosaurs on display to anthropological objects under the careful stewardship of the collections staff.  

The easily searchable portal is designed to help educators, parents, and students immerse themselves in a topic. A search for more information about, for example, Triceratops will yield what you need to know, but the portal will also guide you towards Torosaurus, a relative.  

In a sense, the portal offers the digital version of the real-life experience in the Peabody’s collections space. You might open a drawer and be surprised where it can lead.  

“This will allow for the same browsing experience a scientist might have had in our old portal,” Motz said. “We want anyone with an internet connection to have better access to our collections.”  

The portal’s advanced media capabilities will be vastly improved. It will soon incorporate detailed 3D models and CT scans of delicate materials, while preserving the historical records in the previous version. The site will also offer curated image galleries that will showcase items on exhibition, new acquisitions at the museum, and unique collections at the Peabody.   

“We will be able to offer visually compelling research-grade multimedia to the general public at a scale not easily matched by other institutions,” said Andrew Melien, the Peabody’s digital media specialist who served as front-end developer for the project.  

Peabody Collections Portal

Yale Peabody Museum’s Collections Portal

Motz said the new portal can open Peabody data sets to other institutions, allowing for connections between far-flung yet related objects housed elsewhere, multiplying the educational possibilities.   

“We want to nurture curiosity,” Motz said.  

The Peabody’s work is an important part of a comprehensive effort to make Yale University’s cultural collections accessible. The museum’s new collection website uses the data from Yale’s LUX website, the university’s portal to all its cultural collections.  

“Further advances for LUX are instantly available for the Peabody’s collections, with no additional development costs, ensuring the information is both secure and accessible,” said Dr. Robert Sanderson, Yale’s Senior Director for Digital Cultural Heritage.  

The Yale University Art Gallery has built a new digital collection website on top of the data that they provide to LUX, and the Paul Mellon Center is actively working to utilize the LUX digital infrastructure to improve access to their collections. “The Peabody’s model can be replicated across Yale’s cultural heritage units, enabling each to use the LUX knowledge graph to power their collections portals,” said Jeff Campbell, Yale’s associate director of digital asset technologies.  

In addition, researchers are exploring how LUX can be used by scholars to discover research datasets, extending its capabilities beyond searching for cultural heritage items. “The LUX paradigm directly advances the university’s mission of creating, disseminating and preserving knowledge, both through and in service of research and learning,” Sanderson said.  

While the Peabody’s short-term project – the launch of its collections portal – is complete, the University’s work in this area will be ongoing. Sanderson said that future advances coming to LUX and the Peabody’s portal include optional AI-powered natural language searches. New kinds of searches, including a focus on geographical searches to help find appropriate specimens in the Peabody, are coming soon, he said. 

Through the University’s Cultural Heritage Information Technology (CHIT) partnership, Peabody staff and Yale IT are working together to ensure the Museum’s collections remain accessible to audiences globally. 

“The portal is, in a sense, another room in the building. This one just has everything in it,” Melien said.