---
title: Licenses and Attributions
description: The third-party data vocabularies and software Preservated relies on, the licenses they carry, and the credit your institution must display.
section: legal
order: 1
updated: 2026-06-18
verified: 2026-06-18
related: [reference/authorities, guides/subjects-concepts-and-authorities]
features: [concepts-and-authorities]
---

# Licenses and Attributions

The acknowledgements Preservated owes to the data sources and software it builds on, and the credit your institution is obliged to display when it uses them.

This page is the canonical home for those acknowledgements. It begins with the controlled-vocabulary data providers, which carry display obligations that fall on you as a publisher. Software-library acknowledgements will be added here over time.

## Controlled-vocabulary data providers

When you link a term to a published authority, you are reusing that authority's data, and some licenses require you to acknowledge the source. Both license families in play here — CC BY 4.0 and ODC-BY 1.0 — let you satisfy attribution "in any reasonable manner based on the medium," which a single acknowledgements page like this one fulfills. **Per-item credit on every artifact is not required.** Preservated generates the correct credit line from the authorities each institution actually uses — so an institution that never links a Getty term never displays a Getty credit. You do not maintain this list by hand.

| Provider | Used for | License | Attribution required |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| J. Paul Getty Trust — AAT, TGN, ULAN | Object types, materials, places, artists | ODC-BY 1.0 | **Yes** |
| GeoNames | Places | CC BY 4.0 | **Yes** |
| Nomenclature for Museum Cataloging | Object names | CC BY 4.0 | **Yes** |
| Library of Congress — LCSH, LCNAF, LCGFT, TGM | Subjects, names, genre/form | US public domain | No (credit appreciated) |
| Wikidata | Cross-domain bridge | CC0 1.0 | No (credit appreciated) |
| Iconclass | Iconographic subjects | CC0 1.0 | No (credit appreciated) |

For what each of these vocabularies covers and when to use it, see [Authorities and Controlled Vocabularies](/docs/en-US/reference/authorities).

### Required credit lines

Where your records use terms from these providers, the following acknowledgements are displayed:

- **J. Paul Getty Trust (ODC-BY 1.0)** — <https://opendatacommons.org/licenses/by/1-0/>
- **GeoNames (CC BY 4.0)** — <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/>
- **Nomenclature for Museum Cataloging (CC BY 4.0)** — <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/>

### Credited as good practice

These sources do not legally require attribution, but Preservated credits them anyway because acknowledging your sources is sound cataloging practice:

- **Library of Congress (public domain)** — <https://id.loc.gov>
- **Wikidata (CC0)** — <https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/>
- **Iconclass** — <https://iconclass.org>

:::info
This page is sufficient on its own to meet the attribution terms — the licenses ask for a reasonable acknowledgement of the source, not a credit attached to each record. Where practical, Preservated may also surface these lines closer to the data (public artifact pages, and machine exports such as JSON-LD and IIIF manifests), but that is a convenience, not a license requirement. The stricter "notice must travel with the data" rule in ODC-BY applies only if you redistribute a vocabulary's dataset in bulk — which displaying labels does not.
:::

## Software and third-party libraries

<!-- TODO: enumerate the notable open-source packages Preservated bundles and their licenses
     (MIT, Apache-2.0, BSD, ISC, etc.), plus any that require notice. Start from the production
     dependencies in package.json and the vendored videoscript SDK. -->

Preservated is built on open-source software. A consolidated list of the notable libraries it bundles and their licenses will be published here. If you need a specific acknowledgement before then, contact your deployment administrator.