The commitments
- Stable identifiers
- Every record has a permalink that does not change when its title or copy is edited. A link you cite today resolves to the same record later.
- Citable by design
- Each record exports a citation in three formats scholars actually paste: Chicago (note form), BibTeX (
@misc), and RIS.
- Plain licensing
- Reuse terms are expressed against well-understood bases - Creative Commons CC BY-NC for the open archive, all rights reserved for the rest - not bespoke legalese only we understand.
- Machine-readable
- Records carry structured metadata; the catalog is exposed via sitemap and a machine-readable feed, and discovery crawlers — including AI agents — are welcomed rather than walled out.
- Open formats out
- What you license, you receive in standard image formats — no viewer lock-in, no format you'll be unable to open in a decade.
Descriptive crosswalk
Our internal descriptive fields map onto widely-used cultural-heritage metadata conventions; the formal crosswalk (field-by-field) is published here as it's finalised, so other archives can ingest our records cleanly. Fill in
Spot something that won't interoperate, or a standard we should be honoring and aren't? Tell us — interoperability bugs are bugs.