Welcome. This page is the Research Desk saying it once, for anyone who wants it said. Regulars walk past it. It stands here, unchanged, whenever you want it.
What this place is
The Astoria Archive gathers Astoria and Clatsop County's recorded past in one place: the newspapers, photographs, maps, and voices this place has left, which already live, free and public, in the collections that keep them. The Archive does not hold the collections. It stands in front of them, the way a reference desk stands in front of the stacks, and brings what it is asked for. A record the Archive carries stands here in full; a record it links stands at the archive that keeps it, named on the page.
How much is here
Behind the Research Desk stand the dated records, the people, the places, the annual gatherings, and the records kept at other archives, from the Library of Congress to the kitchen-table archives of this county. What is not here yet is not hidden; the gaps print as gaps, in the record, at fact size.
The ways in
Ask the Research Desk, in plain words: a name, a year, a place. Read in the Reading Room, where the chapters, the names, and the collections stand in the open. Learn by a path, if you teach or study. Listen, in the Listening Room. Work a case, at Cases for Kids, where the children's table stands with the adult record one tap under it. Walk the years in order, in the Museum Walk, if you want the town's story as one walk: gallery by gallery, every stop a record, the Research Desk always one tap sideways. Or walk in through a person or a place on the front page; the record keeps returning to them because the town did.
Taking it with you
Every record here can be saved to your stack, cited in three styles with the citation written for you, emailed to yourself, or printed. Your stack lives on this machine only; there is no account and nothing follows you. On a shared computer, at school or the library, the stack on the screen is that machine's, left by whoever sat there before you. Take yours with you when you go: copy the works-cited page, email the packet to yourself, or print it, and clear the stack behind you.
In Spanish
This whole paper is published in two editions. The editions line at the top of the front page changes the edition; everything here stands in both, the Spanish set with the same care as the English.
If something here is wrong
Corrections are part of the record. Every record names its source, so you can check it the same way. Where two sources disagree, the record prints the disagreement instead of settling it quietly. Where a fact is corrected, the correction prints beside it. If you hold a source that settles something this Archive prints as open, the record wants it.