Extending the Europeana Licensing Framework

Paul Keller from Kennisland asks for feedback on a discussion paper - 'Extending the Europeana Licensing Framework'.

In February this year, work started on two new Europeana projects: Europeana Creative and Europeana Cloud. While the former aims to kickstart creative re-use of cultural heritage objects that are available through Europeana, the latter aims to build a cloud storage infrastructure for Europeana and to make Europeana a better tool for researchers across Europe.

One thing that both of these projects have in common is that they are pushing the boundaries of the existing Europeana Licensing Framework that was adopted in 2012. Europeana Creative aims to develop a Content Re-use Framework that will allow data providers to make high quality digital objects (as opposed to metadata only) available for re-use under specific conditions. Europeana Cloud aims to make it easier for data providers to share rich metadata by allowing licensing conditions other than CC0.

Join the conversation. Image: 'Two men standing talking to each other', Rijksmuseum, public domain.

In order to achieve these objectives, the existing Europeana Licensing Framework will need to be extended. This work is coordinated by Kennisland in close cooperation with the Europeana Foundation. Today, as part of this effort we are publishing a discussion paper that outlines the approach that we are proposing for extending the Europeana Licensing Framework. This discussion paper has been drafted in consultation with key stakeholders from the Europeana Creative and Cloud projects.

It is important to note that we are proposing that all extensions will be on top of the existing Europeana Licensing Framework without changing the existing framework. This means that data providers who do not want to use any of the additional capabilities provided by the Europeana Creative and Europeana Cloud projects will not be asked to make any changes to how and under which conditions they provide metadata to Europeana. In other words, the proposed extensions of the licensing framework will be available on a opt-in basis.

Even though these extensions are voluntary, we want them to be as useful as possible for as many of the Europeana Network members as possible. This is why we encourage all data providers to read and comment on the discussion paper. If you have feedback (or questions) please provide it in the comments of this post.

Discussion paper: Extending the Europeana Licensing Framework