Help yourself (to art)

Digital Commons Images: Indonesian Seated Buddha; John Singer Sargent sketch

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Midnight self-guided tours of Yale’s museums are generally frowned upon. But now you can peruse a pretty good selection of the university’s treasures any time of day or night. In May, the university launched Yale Digital Commons—discover.odai.yale.edu—a website where 250,000 images of objects from the Center for British Art, the Peabody Museum of Natural History, the University Art Gallery, and the University Library are available in a searchable database. (There’s much more to come.) What’s different about this archive is that Yale is making the images of its public-domain items available for free, no permission required, as part of a new “open access” policy. The university emphasizes the site’s value for scholars, artists, and students. But it’s available to anyone.