It’s a central hub that contains 17 million searchable objects across Yale’s museums, archives, and libraries. And it's free for you to use.
“No one likes to search, everyone likes to find,” Robert Sanderson, senior director for digital cultural heritage at Yale University, said at a media briefing Thursday. LUX is able to provide robust context around the object that’s being searched for.
When you enter a term into the search bar, tabs on the page separate the search into different categories: objects, works, people and groups, places, concepts, and events. The advanced search feature as well as filters on the side allow you to narrow down your search. When you click through to a page, there might be hyperlinks that can lead you to discover cross-connections.
The project to build this tool has been in the works for the past five years. And Yale hopes that by doing the heavy lifting, it can make it easier for other institutions to build their own version of LUX. As such, the code for LUX will be open-sourced. That means anyone can view the configurations on databases, as well as all the transformations Yale did on the data. The database that does the searching is proprietary, but can be licensed.
According to Sanderson, the team did run some experiments with ChatGPT, asking it to find specific objects in collections. The AI would give an accession number and a url link for the query, but the link often didn’t work, and the number led to a completely different object. “The model understands how language works, but it’s not a knowledge model, it’s not a fact model,” he said. “You get answers that are convincing but wrong.
The LUX that’s available to the public today is still a work in progress. Already, the team has ideas on how to improve it, and new features that they’re thinking of adding. You’ll notice that on the result pages, there will be a big blue button for user feedback if there’s an ethical issue or if the data is wrong for some reason.