Fostering Creative Reuse of Your Collection

CHIs are increasingly looking for new ways of interacting with the audience, providing spaces for a critical dialogue among citizens, raising awareness of their collections for current and future generations while guaranteeing equal access to cultural heritage for all the citizens.  Hence, together with preserving and giving access to your institution’s digital cultural heritage, you might want to take action to facilitate and encourage its use and with that maximise its impact on society. For this reason, CHIs must, first of all, consider for which purposes they are interested in providing such re-use, e.g. research, education, commercial…etc. and take into account some considerations.

1) Communicate the copyright status of your collection in a clear manner. Adhering to standards, rights statements or CC licences maximises the potential for reuse of a collection.

2) CC licences (simple attribution [BY] and share-alike [BY-SA], particularly) and tools, (such as the CC0 copyright waiver), are some of the simplest means to convey what can be made with the digital cultural heritage assets and to foster re-use and circulation.

3) Relying on licensing metadata standards will help users find your work and bolster reusability.

4) The Europeana Publishing Framework allows you to learn how to best manage the metadata in your cultural assets.

5) Always remember that, regardless of your copyright strategy, exceptions you might rely on and licences you might have acquired, the author's moral rights still subsist! Enabling re-use does not necessarily enable any use

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