Europeana encourages cultural heritage institutions to open up their digital collections for reuse. One of the ways this can be made possible is through assigning your content standardised and interoperable rights statements that make the reuse possibilities for each item clear. Using open rights statements (including PDM, CC0, CC BY, and CC BY-SA) encourages users to creatively interact with the material you publish - for example, in the annual GIF IT UP competition which challenges people to use openly licensed digitised cultural heritage material to produce unique GIFs and share them online! Read on to see from the GIFs themselves the benefits of opening up collections for reuse.
1. To give content another life
The portrait above shows Jenny Lind, a Swedish opera singer who took the USA by storm in the 1850s, and comes from the collection of Nationalmuseum in Sweden. A recent blog from the Europeana collections website celebrated the 200th anniversary of her birthday. A few days after we published it, the painting had been animated and shared for GIF IT UP, bringing Jenny to new audiences!