The West Campus Digital Core is part of an evolving program to make Yale's culture heritage collections more accessible through digitization, development, and digital curation. The digital age has profoundly altered academia with its new teaching, learning, and research opportunities, and this planned state-of-the art facility at West Campus is a key component of Yale's mission to conserve, digitize, store, study, and disseminate its vast collections of art, artifacts, natural history, and documentary holdings.

The West Campus Digital Core is a planned center for digitization and digital analysis to catalyze Yale’s effort in expanding access to and creative use of collections. Professionals in the museums and libraries at Yale will be able to share state-of-the art space, equipment, expertise, and practice to digitize Yale’s great collections of art, artifacts, specimens, and documents. The Digital Core is co-located with the planned Conservation Core on Yale’s West Campus and together they will support the newly established Yale Institute for the Preservation of Cultural Heritage. Yale's West Campus, located 7 miles west of downtown New Haven, is being developed as a center to enhance the teaching and research in the arts and sciences. The Conservation and the Digital Cores support efforts to conserve, digitize, store, and study Yale’s vast collections of art, natural history, and library holdings.

Access to digital content provides new research, learning, and dissemination opportunities that were not possible just a decade ago. Digitization of physical collections increases access and protects artifacts from excessive handling. With Yale’s new policy on open access to digital representations of works in the public domain, these benefits accrue not only to Yale’s community but also worldwide.

The Digital Core is the initial step toward a long-term vision to create and support digitization and media conversion infrastructure to leverage Yale’s culture heritage collections in the digital age. ODAI is leading this broad community collaboration to create a sustainable and shared infrastructure for the museums and libraries – Yale Peabody Museum, the Yale Center for British Art, the Yale University Art Gallery, Beinecke Library, and the Yale University Library.

Phase 1a, in planning for implementation in 2012, will support large-object imaging, 3D imaging, and mass digitization of bound materials.

For more information about the West Campus Digital Core contact odai@yale.edu.