Not each institution content may be immediately available with a free license, depending on various grounds, among which the first one is the copyright respect.
The first thing to do is to make available those contents of which your institution is sure to have the commercial rights and that can easily enrich Wikipedia articles:
Error creating thumbnail: Biographies. Authors, directors, artists, intellectuals' biographies can be used to create short biographical articles or to enrich existing texts (example).
Error creating thumbnail: Artworks. The synthetic description and the images of artworks produced by or belonging to the institutions can enrich the biographies of their artists and become autonomous articles (example).
Error creating thumbnail: Institution documentation. The article can be enriched with documentation from the institution website: institution history, synthetic description of the major fulfilled projects, bibliographies and reviews.
Error creating thumbnail: Festivals, big exhibitions, projects. This documentation can be used to update the articles of the institutions that promote these initiatives or to produce autonomous entries (example).
Error creating thumbnail: Illustrations and didactic images (such as photographic archives, photos of historical events, art collections) can be uploaded on Wikimedia Commons and used – even later – to enrich the entries on Wikipedia and of other projects (example). You can do the same with videos or audio tracks for didactic purposes.
Error creating thumbnail: Didactic material can be uploaded on Wikiversity. The one at a university level in the relative faculty. The one related to high school in the corresponding section (example).
Am I obliged to share all the contents with a free license?
No, you aren't. The institution is free to adopt the license just for some contents.
Am I obliged to use the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (CC BY-SA) license ?
No, you aren't. You can adopt CC BY or CC-0 ("CC zero") license instead of the CC BY-SA; finally you can release the contents in the public domain. Commercial use and derivative works must be always authorized.
Let your colleagues know what are you doing and why.
Get your webmaster involved; he/she will check out the website statistics and put the licenses details online, (read “add the license to your contents”).
Get the press office and those in charge of communication involved; he/she will help you involving colleagues, collaborators, networks and audience.
Get the administration staff or those in charge of contracts and partnerships involved; they will have the chance to use new procedures that make rights managing easier and clearer.
Licenses are adopted in order to use contents safeguarded by copyright. Licenses clearly state which authorizations are allowed and which rights are reserved. In some cases it is not necessary to specify the licenses because the contents are already free by law; however also in these cases the license indication is useful so that users easily and immediately know what to do. The license has to be clearly readable by the user and easily acknowledged by search engines or content management systems. Wikipedia:WikiAfrica/Share Your Knowledge/Creative Commons
