Collections & services
Peabody Museum of Natural History
(Yale University)
Overview
The Peabody Museum of Natural History at Yale University is partnering with ARTstor to make approximately 11,420 images from the Museum's permanent collection and photographic archives available through the Digital Library. A selection of approximately 1,000 highlights from the Museum's natural history collections will be added to ARTstor. These will include documentation of specimens of dinosaurs and mammals, as well as depictions of the same in the famous murals that adorn the Museum's Great Hall—Age of Reptiles and Age of Mammals by Rudolph Franz Zallinger (1919-1995). These images will be joined by approximately 420 images of African art, such as textiles, costumes, basket and bead work, weapons, tools, and ritual objects. The Museum will also contribute approximately 10,000 images from its archival collections, a majority of which will consist of archaeological and ethnographic objects from throughout the Caribbean, including Antigua, Cuba, Puerto Rico, Haiti, Trinidad, the Dominican Republic and other islands, as well as northern South America. In addition, ARTstor is sponsoring a pilot project to produce three-dimensional imagery for African objects housed at the Museum and the Yale University Art Gallery. Through an ongoing collaboration, both museums seek to provide greater access to their unique permanent collections and develop an integrated digital collection in ARTstor that brings together materials currently housed at separate Yale institutions.
The Peabody Museum of Natural History at Yale University was founded in 1866, through a gift from philanthropist George Peabody. That same year, Peabody's nephew, Othniel Charles Marsh—who had persuaded his uncle to make the donation—went on to become the first director of the Museum and the first Professor of Paleontology at Yale University. After Peabody's death in 1869, Marsh used the inheritance from his uncle to begin assembling a collection of animal specimens, archeological objects, and ethnological artifacts. In 1898, Marsh donated his collections to Yale University, further enlarging the Museum's collections, which soon outgrew its original building. By 1925, the Museum moved to its current location, which boasts a two-story Great Hall large enough to display Marsh's massive dinosaur skeletons. Today, the Museum's permanent collection includes over 11 million specimens in anthropology, botany, entomology, geology, mineralogy, ornithology, paleobotany, paleontology, zoology, planetary science, and historical scientific instruments.
Collection information
| Total size of collection* | 11,420 |
|---|---|
| Percentage of completion | 0% |
* Image totals should be regarded as an approximation until a given collection is 100% complete. Users should also bear in mind that the number of images available to them may vary from country to country, reflecting ARTstor’s approach to addressing an international copyright landscape that itself varies from country to country.
Last updated: July 9, 2009