The benefits of open and reusable digital cultural heritage
Copyright restrictions often prevent audiences from using and sharing digital cultural heritage objects. However, when you use rights statements and licenses that permit reuse, you allow the public to share, copy and modify the content without needing to seek permission (as long as they follow the conditions of the license used). This not only allows people to create new things by remixing digital cultural heritage, but can bring benefits for your institution:
- It creates more possibilities for disseminating your collections via social media, blogs, online articles and repositories such as Wikimedia Commons. This helps to reach wider audiences.
- It increases and deepens audience engagement with your collections.
- It could help you fulfill your mission by stimulating creative, educational and research activities.
- It helps strengthen the visibility of your institution, helping you stay relevant in a world where open access to digital cultural heritage is increasingly becoming the norm.
- It can open up new funding possibilities to projects which request freely accessible content and metadata.
- It removes barriers to access, which can save time and money for your institution. Often income from licensing doesn’t cover the expenses of managing the process, and there are other revenue strategies that institutions can utilise while embracing an open-access approach.
How Europeana encourages open and reusable digital cultural heritage
We encourage data providers to allow the reuse of content as widely as possible through our policies and frameworks.
- Through the Europeana Public Domain Charter, we advocate for public domain content to remain in the public domain after digitisation. We believe that access to the public domain enables knowledge equity and encourages creativity. As a cultural heritage institution, you have the power to connect society to the wealth of content in the public domain by adhering to the principle that the digitisation of public domain content does not create new rights over it.
- In addition, the Europeana Publishing Framework introduces four tiers of criteria for measuring content quality by taking into account not just the quality of the digital resources, but also the rights statements and licenses applied to them. The fewer copyright restrictions you place on them, the higher the potential reuse of objects and their value to the end users are.
Making the most of your digital collections
When you share digital objects with rights statements and licenses that permit reuse with Europeana, we help you increase exposure, use and dissemination of your collections:
- We can find imaginative ways of showcasing your collections and encouraging their creative reuse through activities like our puzzles, annual GIF IT UP competition, and colouring books.
- We can create learning scenarios that enable teachers to use openly licensed digital objects from Europeana in their classroom.
- We can strengthen scientific research by incorporating digital objects for which reuse is permitted into research environments such as CLARIN’s Virtual Language Observatory.
- We can help you achieve exposure beyond our platform, for example, through our APIs.
- When we create and promote editorial content we include as much openly licensed content as possible so that the items we highlight can be reused by anyone.
How institutions have opened up their collections for reuse
- Paris Musées
- Cleveland Museum of Art
- Musée de Bretagne
- Lenbachhaus
- Birmingham Museums Trust
- Mauritshuis
- Finnish National Gallery
- Slovak National Gallery
- Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg
- Metropolitan Museum of Art
- Wellcome Collection
Find out more
Got more questions? Check out our FAQs on digital cultural heritage and the concept of openness, available through the Europeana Knowledge Base.