Contributed by Blog Editors Sabrina Davis & Denis Shannon

What is Openverse Online?

In May 2021, Creative Commons announced that they would be joining with WordPress to create a new home for their search engine, CC Search. This new home, launched in Dec 2021, is called Openverse. Openverse is an online search engine that allows users to search for openly licensed and public domain works. At the moment, Openverse only searches for images but intends to include additional media types, such as texts and audio, in the future. According to the Openverse about page, their goal is to provide access to all 1.4 billion Creative Commons licensed and public domain works. 

Openly licensed materials are hosted on many domains across the internet. According to their about sources page, in an effort to provide access to as much content as possible, the team working on Openverse systematically identifies domains hosting CC-licensed content. Openverse pulls from a variety of different sources, such as Flickr, Europeana, the Smithsonian, and Wikimedia Commons.  A full list of current sources can be found on the about sources page. 

Highlighted Features

Openverse looks for open application programming interfaces (APIs) and utilizes Common Crawl data to identify openly licensed and public domain content. Common Crawl is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization that uses technology to capture information available on the web for anyone to access.

The ability to search in one place for openly licensed and public domain content is itself a useful feature: instead of searching multiple different repositories, one can simply search Openverse and see a wide variety of results from multiple sources in one place. Once the search results are returned, Openverse provides a number of filters to allow searchers to fine-tune their searches and find the resources they need. Not only can users filter by file type and aspect ratio, but users can also select image type, making it easy to include or exclude photographs, illustrations, or digitized artwork. Perhaps the most important filter provided by Openverse is the ability to filter by License Type or Public Domain: this allows the results to be filtered by 8 different license types. These filtration options make it very easy to find content that is appropriate for the user’s needs.  

Through the Meta Search feature, users are able to access openly licensed audio and video content from a variety of sources including SoundCloud, Vimeo, and YouTube from their initial query in Openverse. To do this, the user simply enters their search term(s) into Openverse, and then from the results page, clicks either the audio and/or video tab. This will take the users to a page where they can click on links to external repositories of open content. As mentioned in the previous section, Openverse intends to add additional media types including audio, video, and even open texts in the future.

In keeping with Openverse’s commitment to openly licensed content and its open-source nature, users can easily track what projects are being worked on at any given time through the WordPress GitHub page. In addition to the previously mentioned initiatives to add audio and video resources to Openverse, there are currently projects in place to improve the filter sidebar for the search results page, incorporate audio and image results together on the all results page, and functionality to consider the age of an image when image results are sorted by popularity and numerous others. There are also many initiatives to fine-tune Openverse and generally improve its functionality.

Value it brings to open ed/OER world

Users of CC Search will notice that Openverse looks and feels very familiar. The interface that allows you to filter search results by case, license type, etc., still exists with Openverse. The most noticeable addition to Openverse, according to the launch announcement from Creative Commons, is that users will have the ability to choose the language to use in the search engine. As of this writing, 10 languages have been fully translated. Language translation, made possible by Translate WordPress, The addition of Translate WordPress aligns with one of Creative Commons’ goals to achieve their mission to “develop technology…that makes openly licensed material easier to discover and use.” 

Search engines, like Openverse, are invaluable to the world of open content because they enable users to quickly locate open material by limiting the searching to one location. From an academic librarian’s point of view, search engines and databases, like Openverse, can assist in advocating for open education initiatives on a university or college campus because they create a central location for faculty to search for open material. Let’s say that a faculty member states that they can’t adopt OER or redesign their course because they don’t have the time to search multiple locations for open content that they could use in their course(s). The OER/open education advocate on campus could then direct the faculty to one location that is easy to use and access. Introducing faculty to technology that makes open content more easily discoverable may help gain more momentum for open education efforts and support for open values moving forward.

Editor Review

Openverse provides a number of important features for users. In addition to providing one location for users to search a wide range of openly licensed and public domain content, there are numerous features built in to enable users to filter their results. While Openverse currently only supports image results natively, it allows users to search for audio and video content through the integrated Meta Search, and will support audio, video, and text results in the future. Openverse is a useful tool in its current iteration and is positioned to be more useful as new features are implemented. Openverse is an important resource, especially in the world of open, as it improves accessibility to open resources. Openverse is highly recommended, and it will be exciting to see how the resource evolves over time.

Works Cited

Creative Commons (2021). What We Do. https://creativecommons.org/about/

This post is by Sabrina Davis & Denis Shannon and is released under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license, except where otherwise indicated. Please reference OER and Beyond and use this URL when attributing this work; for more information on licensing, see our Open Access Policy.