The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Leonard A. Lauder Research Center for Modern Art has established a new initiative to make inaccessible or rare documents available online. The project, created in collaboration with the Met’s digital department, seeks to advance scholarship through digital access to primary-source materials.

The Digital Archives Initiative (DAI) was made possible through partnerships with institutions and artists’ estates worldwide. Working with the Institute of Art History at the Czech Academy of Sciences in Prague, DAI was able to digitize the unpublished notes of art historian Vincenc Kramář, a leading collector of works by Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso. His detailed notes on one of Picasso’s first solo exhibitions outside France—at Heinrich Thannhauser’s Moderne Galerie in Munich in 1913—which identify many of the works in the show, are now available on the project’s website.

“The Leonard A. Lauder Research Center for Modern Art was founded on a commitment to intellectual collaboration and advancing scholarship, and one of the most impactful ways to do that is by broadening access to important materials on modern art” said Stephanie D’Alessandro, the Met’s curator of modern art and the curator in charge of the Research Center. “The Digital Archives Initiative not only brings archival holdings to a global audience but it also fosters partnerships with institutions around the world, thereby expanding the field and focus of art history.”