Hispana labels more than 1 million records as Public Domain

Europeana’s main ambition is to make cultural heritage available to all and facilitate re-use of this material as much as possible. For this reason, a great amount of effort is put into making sure the user knows what legally can and cannot be done with the material found on Europeana.

In 2013, a large rights labelling campaign was organised to make sure all material in Europeana was provided with a correct rights statement about the legal status of the work. However, there is still work to be done as our recent blogpost describes.

Newspaper image.EuropeanaPD

We are therefore very happy to announce that Europeana now includes more than one million newspaper articles from the Spanish aggregator Hispana that are correctly labelled as being in the Public Domain.

These newspapers were digitised and made available as part of the Virtual Library of Historical Newspapers project. The aim of the project is not only to preserve widely used material that is in a poor state of conservation, but to give access to bibliographic material that in many cases is unique and, therefore, not easily accessible.

Newspaper image. Europeana PD

The project started in 2003 and includes more than 6,5 million pages of historical newspapers coming from 81 public and private institutions. Many of them come from provincial public libraries, but from 2005, the Ministry started to sign agreements with publishers and private institutes. Because of this, there are also universities, municipalities, private foundations, athenaeums, some archives and publishers of newspapers and magazines.

Most of the newspapers are local and cover a wide historical period dating back to the late eighteenth century, and therefore fall in the public domain. All of them have been digitised with public funding. This is why they remain in the public domain after their digitisation, with the aim of make them as widely available as possible for access and re-use.

The fact that this material in Europeana is now provided with a public domain mark makes it absolutely clear to the users that they can use the digitised historical newspapers as they wish.

Europeana congratulates Hispana with this great move towards making Europe’s heritage available to all without any restrictions. To see the newspapers in the Europeana portal, click here.