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Open data

Create something new from our data

State Library Victoria has digitised over 745,000 collection items, resulting in more than 3.1 million individual digitised files – an amazing resource for research and creativity!

Like many cultural institutions all around the world, we are working to make our collections even easier for you to access and use in new and creative ways by releasing content as open data.  

What is open data?

Open data is a term used to describe any data or content that can be freely used by anyone, and modified, remixed and reused for any purpose.

As part of our open data program, we are making available metadata – the descriptions we create when we add an item to our catalogue (for example, the creator's name, the item size or date it was created) – under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) Licence, as well as links to the relevant digitised images. These images are of collection items that are in the public domain and not subject to copyright, or digitised images of works where the Library owns the copyright. This means you can use both the metadata and images for any purpose.

What is available?

You can find our open data sets listed on the Victorian Government data directory and on our GitHub repository, where they can be downloaded directly.

We plan to make many more data sets available in the near future.

If you need something in particular, please let us know but bear in mind that not everything in our collection can be released as open data due to copyright.  You can email us at [email protected] or use the 'Suggest a dataset' link on data.vic.gov.au.

Share the results with us

We would love to see how you use our data.  Please email us at [email protected] or post using the hashtags #slvdata and #opendata in your social channels.