Submitting a rights statement

Once you've identified the right statement(s) for your collection, this page provides information on how to technically submit rights statements to Europeana.

How to submit 

While the process of choosing a rights statement for your collection will differ between institutions, the process for submitting this information to Europeana is standardised.

  • You submit a rights statement as metadata when ingesting your data for publication. The rights statements are encoded as URLs, which point to web pages containing information about the rights and permissions relating to a digital object. The URL is submitted in the edm:rights metadata field: <edm:rights rdf:resource="http://a.rights.statement/"/>

  • If you want to supply additional information, you can do this using the dc:rights field.

  • Where a record has multiple resources, one rights statement can be provided per resource. Read the EDM Guidelines for further explanation.

  • We support all versions of Creative Commons licenses and tools. If you want to make objects available under a jurisdiction-specific Creative Commons licence, you are advised to use the selection tool on the Creative Commons website. This will give you the correct licence URI for the 'edm:rights' field.

  • If you need more help, check out the resources we have provided to help you, including the Publishing Guide and the Public Domain Calculator.

Europeana will check the validity of rights statements before publication. You can read more about this process in the Publishing Guide.

Rights statements and the Europeana API

Rights statements are shared via the API in the same way that any other metadata field is shared. The rights statement in the edm:rights field provides information about the conditions of use of the linked digital objects. 

The statements are a fully searchable field, and most of our rights statements pages are enriched with the semantic web standard RDF, which supports the exchange of data in different formats.

Rights statements in Europeana

Users of Europeana collections find all the relevant rights information below the digital object. By clicking through the rights statement that accompanies an object, users will access a webpage that describes the rights and permissions in more detail. Explore an example. 

Rights preferences can also be indicated when conducting a search in Europeana. Through the 'can I use it' filter, users can search works by rights statements so that they only see works that can be used the way they want. 

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