OpenUp! is a growing network of European institutions from the natural history domain, providing multimedia objects to the Europeana portal www.europeana.eu. This includes digitized specimens, natural history artwork, animal sounds, and videos. The OpenUp! Natural History Aggregator for Europeana is coordinated by the Botanic Garden und Botanical Museum Berlin-Dahlem (BGBM), Freie Universität Berlin, and AIT-Graz (Angewandte Informationstechnik Forschungsgesellschaft mbH).

Collections provide standardised metadata via the BioCASe Provider Software (Biological Collection Access Service), the GBIF Integrated Publishing Toolkit (IPT) or the Museum standard LIDO. During the aggregation process that includes the harvest, transformation and transfer of scientific metadata, these items are enriched by i) literature references, ii) geo names, and iii) multilingual common names of plants and animals to increase the accessibility of objects by non-scientific users.

12 European countries take part in the OpenUp! Network and contribute more than 8.7 million records by now.

Data providers benefit from reaching new audiences, increasing web traffic to institutional websites and gaining better visibility towards research funding organizations and also within society.