Conservation

The West Campus opens a world of possibilities to conserve, digitize and store Yale’s vast collections of art, natural history and library holdings. There is ample room for development, and the buildings formally used for manufacturing and warehouse space will be the focus of Yale’s highest aspirations for the arts. These hangar-like structures are ideal for centralizing the care and storage of Yale’s collections, including books, maps, art, artifacts, and specimens from the natural world.  

Yale Center for Conservation and Preservation - "under development"

Conservation laboratories on West Campus will pioneer  new techniques to support a mission of conservation, teaching, research, and publication of works of art.

Ian McClure, Chief Conservator at the Yale University Art Gallery, is working with Roberta “Bobbie” Pilette, Head of Preservation at Sterling Library, to develop the new Yale Center for Conservation and Preservation.  Their goal is to produce a plan for a conservation facility to be housed at West Campus and serving all Yale collections.

The work of protecting Yale’s collections will pivot around two new core institutes in conservation and digitization. The conservation core will provide technology, analysis, and research to reduce threats common to many objects, including pests and mold, and provide access to tools, such as x-ray fluorescence for object research. Because the conservation core will be close to the West Campus science institutes, with their capacities in imaging, informatics, and chemistry, Yale hopes to break new ground with the latest advances in conservation science, while exploring areas of research and analytical techniques that are at present unknown to the world of conservation.

Digitization

The new digitization core will offer access to equipment and technical expertise to transfer materials, books, artistic objects, and sound recordings onto digital media. Like their counterparts in science, both of these core facilities will support work at the West Campus and across the University.

The West Campus also provides an opportunity to pursue new ways to access Yale’s collections. At present, less than 5 percent of Yale’s holdings are on display and readily accessible for teaching or research. Refitting the West Campus facilities for “browsable storage” will provide students, faculty, and staff constant access to objects, paintings, books, maps, and manuscripts.

Although plans for this new model are still under development, the West Campus is already meeting some of Yale’s storage needs. 

Enhanced security measures were incorporated for areas where collections are kept.  They include multiple levels of electronic card access, intrusion alarms, and closed circuit television systems all of which are monitored 24/7 redundantly by UL certified Alarm Central Stations.

“Bringing Yale’s collections to West Campus will ensure they are accessible in a unique way that has a lot of value. And storing them together will allow them to be studied side by side, fostering collaborating and demonstrating the strength of Yale’s collections as an aggregate whole.” 

West Campus Administration

ODAI West Campus Digitization Collaborative

ODAI's sponsorship of the collaborative scanning facility at West Campus is part of a larger effort to create a shared digitization center for staff and faculty to use digital technologies to enhance access to collections for teaching and research.

Following the delivery of three Kirtas robotic book scanners to West Campus, participants from ODAI, the Peabody Museum of Natural History, Yale Center for British Art, Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library, and Yale University Library Preservation Department are working on individual projects for each of their respective units in a collaborative manner by sharing skills and expertise.  Demonstration of the entire production workflow process have been offered so that curators, conservators, and technicians experience firsthand the opportunities presented to the University through robotic scanning technology.

ODAI web site for more information.

Peabody Museum of Natural History

The Peabody is using the Kirtas Scanning Machine to digitize critical documents from all 11 curatorial divisions and the Museum Archives.  Much of this material documents the Museum's founding and includes handwritten accession ledgers and catalogs, filed notebooks, loan files, receipt books, pamphlets, bound letters-many of which are original copies and Peabody publications.  Digitizing this material will improve resource discovery for teaching of Yale courses and accessibility for graduate student education and scholarly research.

Yale Center for British Art

The YCBA is committed to using new technology to advance the study of British art. To this end, the YCBA proposes to use a Kirtas machine to scan collection- and exhibition-related publications created internally for the Yale Center for British Art since its inception in 1977. Printed volumes as well as a large quantity of pamphlets, brochures and other exhibition-related materials are implicated in this project and will be scanned with the intention of making them available online in the context of the Center's collections.

Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library

The Cushing/Whitney Medical Library is one of five libraries participating in the Digital Heritage Library project.  The goal of this collaborative project, funded for two years by the Sloan Foundation, is to digitize about 30,000 medical works dating from 1800 to 1922.   The PI for the project is Maura Marx, Director of the Open Knowledge Commons in Boston. Other collaborators are the National Library of Medicine, the Francis A. Countway Library at Harvard, the Augustus C. Long Health Sciences Library at Cornell, and the New York Public Library.  The Medical Library will be using the ODAI Kirtas scanner to scan and process about 6,000 books in the two-year period.  Initially the scanned books will be stored in institutional repositories.  Arrangements are being made so that eventually the content may be stored in the Hathi Trust repository. Collections of books on anesthesia and on vaccination, as well as books on pediatrics will be digitized.

For more information, click here for ODAI home page.