Vapriikki Museum Centre announces public access to extensive photo collection in Tampere, Finland

The Vapriikki Museum Centre has announced that it will make its extensive photo collection available for public use. The photo archive holds the largest collection of images related to Tampere and the surrounding Pirkanmaa region, featuring photographs from the 1850s to the present day. Through the Siiri information service, approximately 200,000 digitized images will be accessible for free. According to Vapriikki, this number is significant on an international scale.

Teemu Ahola, the collection manager at Vapriikki, stated that the trend of making collections freely accessible is strong within the museum and archive sector. “The goal is to ensure the broadest possible accessibility, openness, and facilitation of use for cultural heritage materials,” Ahola said in a press release from Vapriikki.

The images are licensed under the CC BY 4.0 license, meaning they can be freely used, shared, modified, and published. When using these images, it is required to credit the Vapriikki photo archive and to mention the photographer’s name when available.

The archive includes historical treasures, such as the first color photograph of Tampere, taken by E. A. Bergius. These images can be used online and in applications as well as in books, exhibitions, presentations, and merchandise. The licensing also permits commercial use of the images, provided it is not prohibited by law. However, using images of individuals for marketing or advertising purposes without their consent is not allowed, nor can images be presented in a misleading or unlawful context.

Vapriikki’s photo archive will publish images for which copyrights have expired or have been transferred to the archive.