Sources

Where does the content on Openverse come from?

There is openly licensed content hosted on millions of domains across the breadth of the internet. Our team systematically identifies providers hosting CC-licensed content. If it’s a good fit, we index that content and make it discoverable through Openverse.

Some providers have multiple different groupings of content within them. Flickr has sources ranging from NASA to personal photography. The Smithsonian Institute comprises a dozen diverse collections. Wikimedia Commons runs the gamut in terms of content, and is used by several galleries, libraries, archives, and museums highlighting some or all of their digitized collections.

Openverse is especially grateful for the work of Europeana, an organization that works to digitize and make discoverable cultural heritage works across Europe. Openverse is able to index hundreds of valuable sources through a single integration with the Europeana API .

How do we decide what sources to add next?

We have a never ending list of possible sources to research prior to integration. We ask ourselves questions like:

• What is the impact or importance of this source to our users? If it exists within a provider like Wikimedia Commons, is it valuable for our users to be able to filter by this source directly?
• Is licensing and attribution information clearly displayed to enable confident reuse?
• How many new total items or new types of items can we bring to our users through this integration? Some sources are direct integrations, while others may be a source within a source.

We appreciate suggestions for new sources from our community of users.

Suggest a new source

Clicking on a Source allows you to browse and filter items within that source.

Image Sources

Audio Sources