About
About the archive
This is a primary-source archive and an encyclopedia of Beaver Island and its archipelago, in northern Lake Michigan. The archive holds faithful copies of the record — newspapers, charts, treaties, registers, field recordings, government layers — each with a note saying where it came from and when. The encyclopedia cites that record, claim by claim.
The rest of it
- What is here
The two halves — a collection of sources, and an encyclopedia written from it — and what the full-text search reaches.
- Why it exists
Three island documents that were scattered, unreadable by machine, or gone from the place that published them.
- How it works
Retrieval, integration, knowledge base — and what a provenance record contains, file by file.
- Getting at it
Full text, plates, a timeline, an almanac, deep zoom on the objects, and stable URIs for machines.
- Editorial standards
The rules the encyclopedia works under, including what is withheld and why a quality score is not verification.
- Who makes it
The editor, the institutions whose collections this is built on, and one particular debt.
- Rights and reuse
What may be republished, what may only be catalogued, why a copy is kept when a website goes dark, and how to cite the archive.
- Corrections and contributions
How to report an error, and what happens if you hold island material you would like preserved.
- Terms and privacy
What is and is not promised about any of this, how to have a photograph taken down, and exactly what the website learns about the person reading it.
Figures above are read at build time from the archive's own exports. The segment count is what the search index held when it was last built, on 4 August 2026.