Number of users of Yale Library Digital Collections steadily climbs

The top-ten most popular objects

The most-often accessed objects in 2024 included these six—which were also among the top-ten objects accessed in 2023:

• Cipher (aka Voynich) Manuscript
• Shams al-maʻārif al-kubrá : manuscript شمس المعارف الكبرى : مخطوطة
• Gleason’s new standard map of the world
• The histomaps, four thousand years of world history; relative power of contemporary states, nations, and empires …
• Rothschild canticles
• Journal of Magellan’s Voyage

Also making the top-ten list for 2024 were these additional four:

• Ezra Pound, “Ten Sonnets [V, VII, VIII, XV, XVIII, XXII, XXIII, XXXIII, XXXV],” autograph manuscript
• Map of Virginia, Gold Hill, Devils Gate, American Flat gold & silver mining districts
• Automobile road map of the western United States including adjacent Canada and Mexico / compiled
• The first photograph ever made showing the division between the troposphere and the stratosphere and also the actual curvature of the earth : photographed from an elevation of 72,395 feet, the highest point ever reached by man

The growing collection

Last year Yale Library Digital Collections grew by 26,000 digital objects—amounting to 600,000 digital files—which is a 420 percent increase over the amount of content added in 2023.

Jonathan Manton, director of Digital Special Collections and Access (DSCA), credits the increase to the concerted efforts of staff members in DSCA and of key partners, including Preservation and Conservation Services, to clear digital backlogs. He also acknowledges the impact that several individual units made—including Lewis Walpole Library and the Medical Historical Library—by taking the initiative to add their own content into the Digital Collections system and Aviary, following guidelines in the new Digital Special Collections Policy for Yale Special Collections.

Among the new “child objects” (individual images and pages or audiovisual files) added to the Digital Collections system in the last half of the year were additions to the Beinecke Library’s Langston Hughes Papers, the Medical Library’s Bert Hansen Collection of Medicine and Public Health in Popular Graphic Art, and Lewis Walpole Library’s New Metamorphosis illustrations by printmaker William Hogarth.

Digital Special Collections

Members of the library’s Digital Special Collections and Access department oversee the materials in Digital Collections, providing leadership, services, and strategic direction to enable user access to digitized and born-digital special collections content across Yale Library.

This year’s newly digitized materials and millions of others are available to view online and to download as JPG images, TIFF images, or PDFs via the Digital Collections site. Audio collections are available via Aviary, the library audiovisual (A/V) access system.

The digitized collections represent only a fraction of the library’s collections materials. New items are being added to the digital collections on an ongoing basis.

Learn more about searching the entire repository of online and on-site special collections.

—Deborah Cannarella

Images: “A Spring-Day Wish of the Class” and “No Cause for Alarm,” Bert Hansen Collection of Medicine and Public Health in Popular Graphic Art, Medical Historical Library, Cushing/Whitney Medical Library; “‘A’ General,” Langston Hughes Papers, James Weldon Johnson Collection, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library; partial view, page 1v,  Pigafetta, “Journal of Magellan’s Voyage,” General Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library; “‘Black Nativity’: London,” Langston Hughes Papers, James Weldon Johnson Collection, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library; “A New Version of the Pied Piper of Hamelin—The Children Refuse to be Charmed,” Bert Hanson Collection of Medicine and Public Health in Popular Graphic Art, Medical Historical Library, Cushing/Whitney Medical Library