Holdings
What the archive holds
Every number here is read from the archive itself. The front door cannot overstate what is behind it.
2336records
1730entities
219datasets
372documents
15claims
1300official places
15vernacular names
8held — contested
62withdrawn
15folk narratives
49tellings
11source collections
518artifacts held
2336records indexed
The three states of the record
Every figure above counts records the archive asserts. Two states are not counted there, and both are counted here, because an archive whose holdings statement reports fewer records after an act of curation — with nothing on the page accounting for the difference — has understated what it holds. Understating is the direction that feels safe and is not.
- Published
- 2336 records the archive asserts. These are the records its retrieval surface draws on and its composed answers may cite.
- Held — contested
- 8 records the archive keeps and does not assert. Their evidence raises a name and does not settle one. Each resolves at its own address with its passage and its attestation printed whole, marked contested; none enters the composed layer, the retrieval corpus, or any structured assertion. They are listed with the claims, and they are published or withdrawn on evidence the day a cleaner source settles the name.
- Withdrawn
- 62 records that once stood correctly and later failed a standard. Each still resolves, still carries its provenance, and states the reason it was withdrawn. Nothing is deleted.
- Refused
- 1895 candidates that never entered, each with the clause it failed on the record. A collection is only auditable if what it excluded stands beside what it holds.
The vernacular layer reconciles exactly: 15 asserted, 8 held, 16 withdrawn — 39 vernacular assertions accessioned in all.
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 |
Browse
- Places — official boundaries and vernacular extents, on separate layers
- People
- Organizations
- Events
- Works and folklore
- Objects
- Documents
- Datasets
- Claims — the gray record