The Land Library of Saxony-State and University Library Dresden has agreed to make 250,000 image files available on the Wikimedia Commons under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike license.
Here's an excerpt from the announcement:
As the first German library, the Land Library of Saxony-State and University Library Dresden (SLUB) has concluded a cooperation agreement with Wikimedia Germany e.V. In a first step, the German Photo Collection of the SLUB makes available ca. 250,000 image files from its repository for free use to Wikimedia Commons, a sister project of Wikipedia.
The photos, the corresponding captions and further meta data will be uploaded to Commons during the coming months by voluntary helpers of Wikimedia, then connected step-by-step with personal identification data and the relevant Wikipedia articles. Apart from that, the metadata supplied by the German Photo Collection can be enriched, commented on and supplied with geographical detail by Wikipedia users. All results of this work are flowing back to the database of the German Photo Collection. In this way, the SLUB too directly profits from the new collaboration.
No rights of third parties concerning the image material supplied are standing in the way of using it under the free license "Creative Commons BY-SA 3.0". The cooperation will, in the words of Dr Jens Bove, the director of the German Photo Collection, "enhance the publicity and reach of the photographic treasures of the German Photo Collection". At the same time, the SLUB is a clear testament to the support of the international Open Access Initiative, which seeks open access to scientific information.
