Rights and reuse

Holding a copy and being allowed to republish it are different things, and this archive keeps them apart. Rights are recorded per file, in the holder's own words, and publication is denied by default: an asset reaches this website only if a classifier reading the provenance sidecars gave it an explicit allow verdict, and the site build fails if a staged file has none.

The rule holds on the other side too. Work this project drew itself has no sidecar, so it is publishable only from an explicit registry naming its licence, its credit line and the script that produced it — "not in the firewall" must never come to mean "publish it". What cannot be republished is still catalogued, by identity, extent and rights as the holder stated them, so a reader can find it and go to the holder. Those rights strings are copied verbatim and never rephrased: a restriction the holder did not ask for is as much an error as a permission they did not give, and 123 records here were corrected for exactly that.

Public-domain federal products (USGS, BLM, NOAA, NPS, Census) are reproduced freely. Internet Archive items vary, and only openly available ones are downloaded; lending-restricted works are catalogued as citations only. In-copyright newspapers are held for research and citation, and republication needs the rights holder's permission. Map data from OpenStreetMap is licensed ODbL 1.0, and attribution is a condition of that licence, which is why the credit is printed on every figure and plate this archive draws.

Why any of this is held at all. Island material goes off the web without anyone deciding that it should. A host lapses, a gallery is retired, a forum closes, a link stops resolving, and what a community put online over twenty years is gone from the place it was put. Several collections here are copies of sites that are no longer maintained — the Beaver Beacon's photo gallery took its last upload in May 2019 — and they are held with their provenance, their checksums and their holders' terms recorded beside them, so that a copy exists and can be shown to be the same file. That is the case for preserving them. It is not a claim that a holder's terms lapse when their website does, and any holder or photographer who asks for an item to come down gets it removed.

If something you are looking for has disappeared — a photograph from a site that has since gone dark, a page that now returns nothing — write to michael.bommarito@gmail.com. Where this archive holds it, a full-size original will be sent to you, with what is recorded about where it came from. Material can also be offered in the other direction; the corrections page says how.

To cite this archive, cite the source it holds, and give the page here as where you found it. Each article, each bibliography entry and each media object carries a citation built only from recorded fields, with a stable URL. Please cite the printed folio where one exists — the editorial standards name the two sources here whose folios and PDF pages disagree.