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About The Legible Archive
The Legible Archive is an independent editorial resource about building and maintaining public reference collections — digitisation, structure, description, mapping and preservation. It is written for practitioners working without institutional support, because that is where most of this work actually happens and where the least guidance exists.
What this site is not
This is worth stating plainly.
- It is not affiliated with any company, group, institution or project that may have previously used this domain name or that operates under any similar name. No connection of any kind should be inferred from the address.
- It is not a library or an archive. It holds no collection, hosts no scanned material and offers nothing to download. It is writing about the practice.
- It is not a consultancy. Nothing here is for sale, no services are offered, and there is no commercial relationship with any tool, vendor or service named in these pages.
- It is not a standards body. Where standards are discussed, the authoritative text is always the one published by the organisation responsible, and it is linked.
Editorial approach
Everything here is written from the position that most reference collections are maintained by very small teams with no budget, and that guidance written for well-resourced institutions is frequently unusable at that scale. Where a recommendation is expensive, that is said. Where the honest answer is that a good practice is unaffordable and a lesser one will do, that is said too.
Specific products and projects are named when they are genuinely the reference implementation or the standard reading, not otherwise. There are no affiliate arrangements, no sponsored placements and no paid links anywhere on this site.
On the material discussed
The subjects covered here — capture, structure, encoding, cartography, description, licensing — are treated as a connected craft rather than as separate disciplines, because in a small project one person usually does all of them and the decisions interact. A capture resolution chosen in week one constrains recognition in year two; an encoding left unexamined breaks sorting; a URL scheme chosen for convenience breaks citation. The pages cross-reference each other for that reason.
Corrections
Technical writing about long-lived formats and standards dates, and some of it is wrong on the day it is published. Corrections are welcome and are made in place. Where a correction changes the substance of a recommendation rather than fixing a detail, the change is noted in the text rather than made silently, because a reader who acted on the earlier version deserves to know it moved.
Reuse
Given the subject matter it would be poor form not to say so: the writing on this site may be quoted freely with attribution. The addresses of these pages are intended to be permanent, for the reasons set out in link rot and permanent URLs, and any that ever have to move will be redirected rather than dropped.