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John Oxley Library

State Library of Queensland images on Wikimedia Commons

By JOL Admin | 22 December 2010

50,000 copyright-free Queensland images from our collections are now available through Wikimedia Commons.

Featured image for blog post 149402
This State Library of Queensland image is Wikimedia’s newest banner.

This State Library of Queensland image is Wikimedia’s newest banner.


This is the largest collection donated by an Australian cultural institution and the fourth largest collection made available on the site since the establishment of Wikimedia Commons, an online repository of free-use images, sound and other media files.  The Wikimedia Foundation has been actively seeking content from the Galleries, Archives, Libraries and Museums (GLAM) sector to provide more high quality content for the Commons to increase the quality and scholarship of other Wikimedia projects such as Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia.   Other content donors from the GLAM sector include the German Federal Archive, the Tropenmuseum in Amsterdam, the National Portrait Gallery in London, and the Bibliotheque Nationale de France.

Each month, 400 million people visit Wikimedia projects providing State Library images with a major worldwide audience.   Digitised State Library content available in Wikimedia Commons provides a forum for Wikimedia community creators to use their knowledge and expertise to add value to information about our photographs and enables new content to be created from our Queensland images.

This is the first of a series of  collaborative projects with Wikimedia Foundation in 2011 exploring further opportunities to work with the Wiki community to help describe, identify and transcribe images from our digitised content.

Available on www.wikimedia.org.au, the selected images were chosen by Foundation staff for their regional Queensland focus and to enhance the present Wikipedia content.

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