LUX: Yale Collections Discovery

LUX: Yale Collections Discovery

Mission Statement

Revealing the cultural heritage collections of Yale University to the world, LUX: Yale Collections Discovery provides a unified gateway to the holdings of Yale’s museums, archives, and libraries. This transformative service enables users to identify, access, and engage with items of interest within Yale’s physical and digital collections. It also uncovers relationships among items, inviting users to explore additional materials across collections.

Values

LUX is a digital platform that enables users to search across Yale’s museums, archives, and library collections. This includes works of art, archives, scientific specimens, and other cultural heritage items held at the University. Since its foundation in the early 18th century the University has encouraged, accumulated, and actively built its collections in the service of its educational mission. LUX supports this mission by making many of these objects and resources accessible, so that new knowledge and understanding can be built by those within and beyond Yale.

LUX exposes longstanding and deep bias within our acquisition activities, collection systems, and descriptive practices. Some content, and the description of that content, is outmoded, racist, and culturally insensitive. Yale’s cultural heritage institutions commit to identifying and addressing these issues, and also to being transparent about documenting such processes. Individually and collectively, the institutions seek to treat users with respect, ensuring dignity is extended to all those who created, or are represented in, Yale’s collections. This includes numerous groups who historically have been marginalized and systemically silenced, whose perspectives, expertise, and authority will contribute to the direction of LUX’s future.