About
What this archive is
The Boston Archive is the authority source for one subject: Boston, Massachusetts. It is a total single-subject archive, not a wiki.
The record types
- Entity
- A place, person, organization, event, work, or object.
- Document
- A source text or artifact. Bodies in object storage; metadata, extracted text, and the digest of the retrieved bytes here.
- Dataset
- A tabular accession, with its distributions and the publisher's own column dictionary preserved verbatim.
- Claim
- The gray record. An attested assertion carrying who attests it, since when, and on what evidence — with variants preserved rather than adjudicated.
The two layers of geography
Official district boundaries sit on one layer, promulgated by an authority with the power to draw them. Attested lived names and extents sit on another, held by attestation alone. They are separate records in separate rows, and the database refuses to let either become the other: an official place must name its authority, and a vernacular place may not cite one.
This matters because both are true and they are not the same kind of truth. A city draws a line; a neighborhood is where people say it is. An archive that stored only the first would be missing the city, and one that overwrote the first with the second would be missing the record.
Non-adjudication
The claim table has no truth column and will not grow one. What it has is an attestation strength — well attested, attested, single source — which counts independent mouths and their standing and says nothing about correctness. Claims that assert the same thing differently share a group and are served together, in full, unranked.
Folklore
Each tale is a record. It carries its variants, its tellers, and its first attestation in print, and a tale whose earliest printing cannot be named is not accessioned. Where a collector left a teller unnamed, the record says unattributed rather than omitting the teller — that silence is data about the collection.
Provenance
Every record carries its source, its license, its retrieval date, the source's own rights statement verbatim, and every transform between the bytes as retrieved and the record as served, in order, with the tool that performed each one.
Source collections
| Collection | Publisher | License | Records |
|---|---|---|---|
| City of Boston Open Data Portal (Analyze Boston) The City of Boston's CKAN open-data catalog. Every dataset the city publishes about itself, with the city's own metadata and its own column dictionaries preserved verbatim. | City of Boston | Open Data Commons Public Domain Dedication and Licence (PDDL) 1.0 public_domain | 1445 |
| USGS Geographic Names Information System — Domestic Names, Massachusetts The federal gazetteer: every geographic name the United States Board on Geographic Names has entered for Massachusetts, with its feature class, its coordinates, and its federal identifier. | United States Geological Survey | United States Government Work — public domain public_domain | 470 |
| Boston Public Library digital collections The Boston Public Library's own digital collections — the Boston Pictorial Archive, the Norman B. Leventhal Map Center, the print department and the arts department among them. BPL publishes them through Digital Commonwealth rather than through a rights API of its own, so the field path is the same and the holding institution is recorded on every record: four hundred and fifty-three of five hundred Boston items sampled are BPL's, and the archive names who holds the original rather than only who aggregated the metadata. | Boston Public Library | No Copyright - United States public_domain | 215 |
| Internet Archive — Boston texts Scanned public-domain books about Boston, including the deeper folklore and vernacular collections beyond Drake and Skinner. The rights field is named `possible-copyright-status`, and the hedge in that name is taken seriously: a NOT_IN_COPYRIGHT review clears only alongside the item's own pre-1929 publication date, or an explicit license grant. | Internet Archive and its scanning partners | Public domain — published before 1929 public_domain | 73 |
| Digital Commonwealth — Massachusetts Collections Online The aggregated digital library of Massachusetts: photographs, maps, manuscripts and printed matter held by libraries, museums and archives across the Commonwealth. Rights vary ITEM BY ITEM on a single page of results, and are read per item from `rightsstatement_uri_ss` at accession. Items whose determination is reserved, conditional, or unevaluated are refused and the refusal is filed. | Digital Commonwealth, Inc. and its member institutions | No Copyright - United States public_domain | 60 |
| Library of Congress digital collections The Library of Congress's digitized holdings of Boston: photographs, panoramic views, architectural surveys and maps. The per-item rights advisory is read at `item.rights_advisory`, and only its unconditional forms clear — an advisory that determines a class of item rather than this one is refused however reassuring its opening clause. | Library of Congress | United States Government Work — public domain public_domain | 40 |
| Skinner, Myths and Legends of Our Own Land (1896) Skinner's national collection, published at Philadelphia in 1896. Its New England section carries the Boston and eastern Massachusetts legends, several of them in variants that differ from Drake's. | Charles Montgomery Skinner, 1852–1907 | Public domain — published before 1929 public_domain | 30 |
| Boston Planning Department neighborhood boundaries The official neighborhood boundaries of the City of Boston, as promulgated by the planning authority. The official geographic layer of this archive. | Boston Planning Department (formerly BPDA) | Open Data Commons Public Domain Dedication and Licence (PDDL) 1.0 public_domain | 27 |
| Drake, A Book of New England Legends and Folk Lore (1884) Drake's collection, published at Boston in 1884. One of the earliest systematic printings of the legends of eastern Massachusetts, and for many of them the first attestation in print this archive can name. | Samuel Adams Drake, 1833–1905 | Public domain — published before 1929 public_domain | 22 |
| English Wikipedia A reference work under a share-alike license. The archive uses it for one purpose: as an ATTESTOR of vernacular usage. A claim is filed only when the article's own text is found to contain the name, and the sentence that contains it is quoted as the evidence. Nothing is filed on the strength of the archive's belief that a name is used. | Wikimedia Foundation and its contributors | Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 open | 21 |
| Project Gutenberg Transcribed public-domain texts. The determination is read from each book's own RDF at <dcterms:rights>, per book, and a book whose RDF does not state it is in the public domain in the United States does not enter whatever the archive believes about its author's dates. | Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation | Public domain in the USA public_domain | 3 |
Standards
Records are emitted under the CSTS-01 archive profile — twelve layers of machine-readable metadata, with the provenance chain addressable as graph nodes. The profile is published at the CSTS Reference Profile, ratified 3 September 2026, and every record emitted under it declares signed conformance.
Writing
There is no public write surface. Accession runs by command line. The database role this engine connects as holds exactly one privilege, SELECT, and the engine refuses to start if that role turns out to be writable.