Corrections and contributions

Taking a photograph down

If you are in a photograph here, or you posted one, you can have it removed or altered. You do not need a reason, and you will not be asked for one. There is no form and nothing to prove.

Write to michael.bommarito@gmail.com. What helps, in rough order of usefulness:

• The page address. Copy the URL out of the browser bar — it looks like beaverislandarchive.org/media/photograph/…. This is the one thing that removes all doubt about which image is meant.
• What you would like done. Three things are possible: the image can come down entirely; it can be replaced with a version that masks or crops out one person, leaving the rest; or a description or tag that is simply wrong can be fixed. Say which — and if you are not sure, say that instead and it can be worked out.
• Which person, if it is about one person. "The child on the left" is enough. No names are needed.
• Any deadline or particular concern. If something is urgent, say so and it will be treated as urgent.

If you cannot find the URL, describe the photograph in whatever way is easiest — where it was taken, roughly when, what is in it — and it will be found.

What happens next: the image stops being published, usually the same day. The record — its title, date, where it came from and on what terms — stays at the same address, marked as withdrawn, so that links to it do not simply break and so the archive can account for its own gaps. Everything written from looking at the image, including the machine description and the tags, is deleted along with it. The original file is not published again.

Corrections

Corrections are welcome and are treated as findings: what was wrong, what the evidence is, and where the record now stands. The evidence is the part that matters — the citation rule applies to a correction exactly as it applies to an article.

The machine-written descriptions on image pages are a special case: they were produced by a model, they are labelled as unchecked, and they are wrong often enough to matter — about who is pictured, where, when, and what is happening. Somebody who recognises a face or a shoreline knows more than the model did. Corrections to those are especially wanted, and need no citation beyond your own knowledge.

If you hold island material

If you hold island material — a run of a paper, photographs, letters, a family's papers — and would like it preserved and made searchable, that is exactly the work this archive exists to do. It would be copied faithfully and recorded with where it came from; what could then be republished follows from the rights as its holder states them.

Write to michael.bommarito@gmail.com.