THE ASTORIA ARCHIVE · Open this section in the Archive
How This Archive Is Made
This page tells how a record gets here: where the records come from, what lets one be carried in, how its words become searchable, how its pictures are treated, how the Spanish edition is made, and how any of it can be checked. Nothing about the making is hidden.
Where the records come from
The originals stand at the archives, libraries, and museums that keep them, and every collection this Archive draws on is named, with its terms, on the Sources & Citations page. The newspapers come chiefly from the Library of Congress, in Chronicling America, and from Historic Oregon Newspapers at the University of Oregon. The documents and books come from the Clatsop County Historical Society's own archive, kept online at the Internet Archive. The recordings come from the University of California, Santa Barbara Library; the map and chart sheets from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the U.S. Geological Survey; the films from the Internet Archive and the Defense Visual Information Distribution Service. What a holder keeps back, the Archive does not take: some collections are linked only, and the nations' own collections stand first among those, told at their own sites in their own words.
What lets a record be carried in
Two things, and only two: a source, named in words and linked to the record itself, and the right to carry it. Material in the public domain carries, and so does material its holder licenses for reuse, under the licenses named CC0, CC BY, and CC BY-SA, with the credit printed exactly as the holder asks. Material licensed for noncommercial use only does not carry, with one exception, decided on its own and printed as an exception beside the record: the Finnish cylinder recordings, carried under their holder's noncommercial license, with the license, the holder, and the performer printed beside every player. Nothing else admits a record, and nothing else keeps one out.
A date, a place, and a description are printed when the source gives them, and their absence never keeps a record out: a record whose date is not recorded stands with the undated records and says so, and one whose place is not recorded says that instead. A record files under the kind it is: a yearbook as a yearbook, a directory as a directory, a drawing as a drawing, never dressed as something else. Where the Archive does not hold a record at all, the entry here says so and gives one of two reasons: the Archive does not hold it, or the Archive cannot get access to it. No third reason stands anywhere.
How the words become searchable
The Research Desk searches the words inside the records, not only their titles. For the newspapers, the words are the holder's own machine reading of the same page scans, taken at the same time as the page pictures, page by page. They are taken letter by letter as the holder gives them, and they are never corrected, completed, or tidied here: a search that quietly improved its text could not be trusted, so the reading stands as the holder made it, imperfect the way the source made it. A book or document carried as text answers by its full text; one carried as a file of page pictures answers by the record its source gave it, and its record says which. A corrected transcript, read against the original page and proofread by a person, is different work from the machine reading, and where such a transcript stands it is labeled as one; the search text itself is never passed off as one. The words inside a newspaper stand in the paper's own language, Finnish for the Finnish papers among them; the record around the words stands in English and Spanish.
How the pictures are treated
Color stays color. A picture carried here is shown in the colors its source holds: color is never taken out of a holding, and never added to one that has none; the Archive's gray is for its own lettering and lines, never laid over a picture. Newspaper pages are assembled page by page and carried at reading size: large enough that every word reads clearly, small print included, and smaller than the master scans, on purpose, because the copies have to stay small enough for whole runs to stand here and stay free. The master scans at full size stand at the Library of Congress and at Historic Oregon Newspapers, and every carried issue's record names its source and links to the issue there, as the newspapers chapter also says. A map or chart sheet carried whole is cut here into the small squares its close view serves, so a reader can move from the whole sheet to one street without carrying the whole file at once.
How the Spanish edition is made
The Spanish edition is the same Archive speaking Spanish, not a summary of the English. Every page stands in both languages. Every record whose source gives a description carries that description in Spanish as well as English, rendered from the record itself, with nothing added the source does not give; where the source gives no description, the Spanish says plainly, from the record's own facts, what the item is and where it is kept, instead of dressing a guess as a description. The names of people, places, and organizations print the same in both languages, and the subjects a record is found by stand in both. The register is one register throughout: the formal usted, the way a reader is spoken to with respect.
How to check any of this
Every record names its source, with a link to that source where one exists, and every record carries its citation, written for you in the style you choose, so the trail from anything here leads back to the archive that keeps the original. Where two sources disagree, the record prints the disagreement instead of settling it quietly. When a fact here is corrected, the correction prints on the record itself, beside the fact.
The checking has its own page: Sources & Citations names every holder and its terms, and shows how a citation is built. If you hold a source that settles something this page or any record prints as open, the record wants to know; the About page says how to reach the Archive.