Yale's Open Access policy

Yale's "Open Access" policy
Yesterday, Yale announced its new "open access" policy for online images of millions of objects housed in Yale's museums, archives, and libraries, and 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. Yale is using a Creative Commons license, Attribution 3.0 Unported (CC BY 3.0) for the open access material. "This license lets others distribute, remix, tweak, and build upon your work, even commercially, as long as they credit you for the original creation. This is the most accommodating of licenses offered. Recommended for maximum dissemination and use of licensed materials."

This policy is a big big success for Yale and its Office of Digital Assets and Infrastructure (ODAI) and the libraries, archives, and museums at Yale. Without a centralizing, coordinating agency on campus, I can't imagine that Yale University would have been able to make this decision and connect it to a tool for discovery across Yale's many cultural and scientific units such as the libraries at Yale, the Yale University Art Gallery, the Peabody Museum of Natural History, and the Yale Center for British Art. ODAI is proving its value to Yale.

ODAI report to CNI on digital content & strategy at Yale

http://odai.research.yale.edu/sites/default/files/file/CNI2009-Final.pdf

The above link to ODAI's presentation to CNI in Dec. 2009 is a nice summary of what ODAI is doing and how the digital strategy it has for Yale is working out.

Smithsonian Institution Collections Search Center

Last month, the Smithsonian Institution launched a Collections Search Center at

http://collections.si.edu/search/

This search tool brings together over 2 million searchable records with 265,900 images, video and sound files, electronic journals and other resources from the Smithsonian's museums, archives & libraries.

The work was done by Quotient. Quotient is a systems integrator and IT services solution company for commercial, government organizations and federal agencies.

Quotient redesigned the existing Collections Search Center with a focus on improving the visual aesthetic, usability, and appeal for students, teachers, scholars, researchers, and the general public. Quotient's design and development team worked out several design directions and partnered with the Smithsonian to increase accessibility and compliance as well as to enhance the site with an interactive slideshow framework.

It is nicely done. In some respects Yale University is like SI--a broad-based research institution with fast-growing research collections and a mission to advance knowledge and educate.

Yale ODAI has web page now

Yale's Office of Digital Assets and Infrastructure now has a web page.

http://odai.research.yale.edu/

The page was announced on Friday. ODAI was established in the fall of 2008 to "develop a university-wide digital content strategy."