Scanning days
At the library: the original goes home with its owner; the scan and its story stay.
THE ASTORIA ARCHIVE · Open this section in the Archive
About the Archive
The Astoria Archive is one door into this place's whole recorded past. The archives of the country already hold Astoria's newspapers, photographs, maps, and voices, free and public, in dozens of separate archives. Almost nobody can find them. Finding them is the work here.
Free means free
Nobody pays to use this site, nobody pays to be listed in it, and nothing here is for sale. It is kept in Astoria by one volunteer, as a gift to the county that raised the questions.
How a record gets here
Every listing comes from a source, and every listing names it. Each record is checked against the holding archive's own pages first; where the archive does not say it, the keeper looks in the public record. A date is printed only at the precision its source supports, a conflict is printed as a conflict, and a thin place is printed thin. The index grows only by what its sources support, never by invention.
The sources
The collections behind the Research Desk include Historic Oregon Newspapers and Chronicling America (the newspaper backbone), the Library of Congress (photographs and the Sanborn maps), the Smithsonian Open Access, the Digital Public Library of America and Northwest Digital Heritage, USGS topoView and NOAA (the ground and the water), the National Archives, Oregon Digital, the Oregon Encyclopedia, and the county's own keepers: the Clatsop County Historical Society, the Columbia River Maritime Museum, and the Oregon Historical Society. Tribally governed collections are linked only, never reproduced; the Chinook Indian Nation's own page stands in the first strand of the Learning Path.
Bring what you have
A community's archive that only takes is a warehouse; this one is built to be fed. Three ways in, each with its rights stated before anything is handed over:
Attic finds
A photograph, a letter, a fair ribbon, with the owner's own account recorded as the record's first text.
School projects
A class's local history work, published with the school's and families' say-so.
Every contribution arrives with a credit line and a rights choice the contributor picks in plain words; nothing enters the record uncredited or unconsented. Anything touching the Native nations' material is referred to the Nation, never accepted over this counter.
The building
This Archive holds Astoria and Clatsop County at full depth: the Research Desk, the index, and the town's whole record, kept by one pair of hands. Photographs and newspaper pages arrive record by record, in place, under their holders' terms; where a term keeps a record at its own home, the record here says so, and says why.
The Astoria Archive
Clatsop County Edition · Free, always
This Archive is gathered and kept by one volunteer. Every record is checked as carefully as one pair of hands can check it, and corrections, questions, and anything you would like to add are welcome: to reach the Archive, click here.