🏛 Yale LUX Cultural Objects Scraper

🚀 Turn the Yale LUX catalog into clean, structured records. Search across Yale's museums, libraries, and archives and pull cultural objects from a single cross collection index of more than 76,000 paintings alone.

🕒 Last updated: 2026-06-08 · 📊 Up to 13 fields per record · cross collection · live Linked.Art API

Yale LUX unifies the collections of the Yale University Art Gallery, the Yale Center for British Art, the Peabody Museum, the Yale University Library, and more into one searchable index built on the Linked.Art standard. This Actor searches that index by keyword and optional object type, then returns one tidy record per object with its title, maker, date, materials, classification, holding unit, and image reference.

Coverage is the public Yale LUX cross collection catalog as Yale publishes it. A single keyword like painting matches tens of thousands of objects, and you can narrow by classification such as photographs, manuscripts, or sculpture to focus on one object type.

🎯 Target Audience	💡 Primary Use Cases
Museum and gallery staff	Build and refresh cross collection catalogs
Digital humanities researchers	Assemble datasets of objects, makers, and dates
Art historians and curators	Track works by classification, material, or holding unit
Educators and students	Source images and metadata for teaching and study

📋 What the Yale LUX Cultural Objects Scraper does

This Actor calls the public Yale LUX search API, walks the result pages, and fetches each object's Linked.Art document to return one clean record per object:

• Search any keyword across titles, makers, classifications, and descriptions.
• Filter by an optional object type classification to focus the results.
• Map the Linked.Art document into flat, stable fields you can drop into a spreadsheet or database.

You control how many records come back, and every record carries a scrapedAt timestamp.

🎬 Full Demo (🚧 Coming soon)

⚙️ Input

Field	Type	Description
query	textfield	Free-text search across Yale LUX objects, for example painting, dog, or manuscript.
objectType	textfield	Optional classification to narrow results, for example photographs or sculpture. Leave empty to search every type.
maxItems	integer	How many records to return. Free plan is capped at 10.

Example 1 — search all paintings

{
    "query": "painting",
    "maxItems": 25
}

Example 2 — photographs matching a keyword

{
    "query": "dog",
    "objectType": "photographs",
    "maxItems": 50
}

⚠️ Good to Know: Yale LUX spans many collections, so titles, makers, dates, materials, and images vary by object. Some records are untitled or credited to an unknown maker, and not every object has a digitized image. Each field is filled when the source provides it.

📊 Output

Each object record looks like this:

Field	Description
🖼 imageUrl	Primary image reference for the object
📌 title	Object title or name
🔗 url	Yale LUX Linked.Art document URL
🆔 id	Object UUID
🏷 objectType	Linked.Art type, for example HumanMadeObject
🗂 classification	Array of classification terms, for example Paintings
🎨 maker	Array of makers or agents
📅 date	Display date of production
🧱 materials	Array of materials the object is made of
📐 dimensions	Readable height, width, and depth string
🔢 accessionNumber	Accession or call number
🏛 holdingUnit	Owning department or collection
🕒 scrapedAt	Collection timestamp
❌ error	Null on success

Real sample — painting by Kerry James Marshall

{
    "imageUrl": "https://media.collections.yale.edu/thumbnail/yuag/obj/138261",
    "title": "Untitled",
    "url": "https://lux.collections.yale.edu/data/object/80a46f5f-4816-4d81-a920-29d3bfdc9082",
    "id": "80a46f5f-4816-4d81-a920-29d3bfdc9082",
    "objectType": "HumanMadeObject",
    "classification": ["Paintings", "Visual Works", "human figures (visual works)", "portraits"],
    "maker": ["Kerry James Marshall (American, born 1955)"],
    "date": "2009",
    "materials": ["acrylic paint"],
    "dimensions": "height 155.26 cm, width 185.1 cm, depth 9.84 cm",
    "accessionNumber": "2009.161.1",
    "holdingUnit": "Yale University Art Gallery",
    "scrapedAt": "2026-06-08T22:06:29.624Z",
    "error": null
}

Real sample — painted tile

{
    "imageUrl": "https://media.collections.yale.edu/thumbnail/yuag/obj/5729",
    "title": "Painted Tile with Sea Monster",
    "url": "https://lux.collections.yale.edu/data/object/d3174125-8445-407f-8571-db60eed8649e",
    "id": "d3174125-8445-407f-8571-db60eed8649e",
    "objectType": "HumanMadeObject",
    "classification": ["Paintings", "Visual Works", "tiles"],
    "maker": ["Unknown"],
    "date": null,
    "materials": ["clay", "paint", "plaster"],
    "dimensions": "height 39 cm, width 39 cm, depth 4.5 cm",
    "accessionNumber": "1933.275",
    "holdingUnit": "Yale University Art Gallery",
    "scrapedAt": "2026-06-08T22:06:29.701Z",
    "error": null
}

Real sample — Jackson Pollock

{
    "imageUrl": "https://media.collections.yale.edu/thumbnail/yuag/obj/60600",
    "title": "Number 13A: Arabesque",
    "url": "https://lux.collections.yale.edu/data/object/8dc90054-443a-4191-ac9f-64b30c449d96",
    "id": "8dc90054-443a-4191-ac9f-64b30c449d96",
    "objectType": "HumanMadeObject",
    "classification": ["Paintings", "Visual Works", "abstract (general art genre)"],
    "maker": ["Jackson Pollock (American, 1912–1956)"],
    "date": "1948",
    "materials": [],
    "dimensions": "height 94 cm, width 297.2 cm, height 97.8 cm, width 298.5 cm, depth 5.4 cm",
    "accessionNumber": "1995.32.1",
    "holdingUnit": "Yale University Art Gallery",
    "scrapedAt": "2026-06-08T22:06:29.767Z",
    "error": null
}

✨ Why choose this Actor

• One clean record per object, with the image reference placed first for instant previews.
• Flat fields parsed out of the nested Linked.Art document, so you skip the graph traversal.
• One search reaches across every Yale collection in the LUX index at once.
• No account, no key, and no login required.
• Stable field names that map cleanly onto a catalog schema.

📈 How it compares to alternatives

Approach	Effort	Structured fields	Images included	Maintenance
This Actor	One run	Yes	When available	None on your side
Browsing the LUX site by hand	Hours	Manual	Manual	Constant
Writing your own Linked.Art client	Days	You build it	Manual	You own the upkeep

🚀 How to use

1. Create a free Apify account using this sign-up link.
2. Open the Yale LUX Cultural Objects Scraper.
3. Type a query such as painting, manuscript, or an artist name.
4. Optionally set an objectType and a maxItems value.
5. Click Start and grab your results when the run finishes.

💼 Business use cases

Museums and galleries

Goal	How this helps
Build a cross collection catalog	Pull objects from every Yale collection at once
Audit holdings by material or type	Filter by classification and read the materials field

Research and digital humanities

Goal	How this helps
Assemble a study dataset	Collect titles, makers, dates, and holding units
Map an artist's works	Search a maker name and group the results

Education

Goal	How this helps
Source teaching material	Use object images and metadata in lessons
Build student assignments	Hand learners a clean object dataset

Content and curation

Goal	How this helps
Plan an exhibition checklist	Gather candidate objects by theme
Credit works accurately	Read maker, date, and accession number fields

🔌 Automating Yale LUX Cultural Objects Scraper

Connect runs to the tools you already use:

• Make and Zapier to trigger runs and route records into sheets or databases.
• Slack to post a summary when a run finishes.
• Airbyte to load results into a warehouse.
• GitHub Actions to schedule periodic snapshots.
• Google Drive to archive each run's output.

🌟 Beyond business use cases

• Research: study how cultural objects cluster by maker, material, or period.
• Personal: build a reading list of artworks that interest you.
• Non-profit: power a community arts education resource.
• Experimentation: prototype a collections app without learning the Linked.Art graph.

🤖 Ask an AI assistant

Paste your results into ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, or Microsoft Copilot and ask it to group objects by classification, summarize a maker's body of work, or draft exhibition labels from the metadata.

❓ Frequently Asked Questions

Do I need a Yale account? No. The Actor reads the public Yale LUX API, which needs no login.

Do I need an API key? No key is required.

What does Yale LUX cover? LUX is a cross collection index that unifies the Yale University Art Gallery, the Yale Center for British Art, the Peabody Museum, the Yale University Library, and other Yale collections.

How do I narrow my search? Use the objectType field with a classification term such as photographs, manuscripts, or sculpture.

Why are some objects untitled? Yale LUX includes many works that have no formal title. The Actor returns the name the source provides, or marks the title accordingly.

Why does a maker show as Unknown? Some objects have no attributed maker. The Actor passes through what Yale LUX records.

Does every object have an image? No. Not every object is digitized. When an image reference exists it appears first in the record.

What does the date field contain? It is the display date of production as Yale records it, for example 2009 or a date range.

How fresh is the data? Each run queries Yale LUX live, so results reflect the catalog at run time.

Can I schedule this? Yes. Use Apify Schedules to snapshot a search on any cadence.

🔌 Integrate with any app

Results are available through the Apify API, so you can pull them into any app, database, or workflow you already run.

🔗 Recommended Actors

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• More reference and open data Actors in the ParseForge collection

💡 Pro Tip: browse the complete ParseForge collection.

🆘 Need Help? Open our contact form

⚠️ Disclaimer: independent tool, not affiliated with Yale University or Yale LUX. Only publicly available data is collected.