The archive
Sorted by era, and by whether you can still ask the person
The second of those is the question a long archive forces and a short one never does. Narrow these six collections by the decade they come from and by whether the subject is reachable, then open one and read our position on it — including the one we mark as not ours to do.
Narrow it
Which era it comes from
Can the person still be asked
Showing 4 of 6 collections.
- Working
Class-year and reunion galleries
The one collection organised by a number rather than by a date.
Our position. Every person shown has to have a current agreement of their own. Being an alumnus is not consent, attending a reunion is not consent, and having been photographed at twenty is not consent at sixty.
- Working
Commencement
The single most photographed hour in the institution’s year, for a century.
Our position. Presence at a ceremony is not an agreement to a later use. For anything beyond recording the event, the person’s own decision is what governs.
- Working
The athletics archive
Decades of team photographs, and the ones that get used most.
Our position. Where a person can be reached and has agreed, it is available. Where they cannot be reached, the honest position is that you have an institutional record rather than a licence to feature an individual, and treating those as the same thing is the mistake this whole site is about.
- Working
Imagery in a giving appeal
The sharpest consent question your office has, and the one with money attached.
Our position. An explicit agreement from the person, for this use, that they can withdraw. Not a general alumni-relations consent, and not an inference from the fact that they have given before.
Why reachability is a filter and not a footnote
Because it is the axis on which a long archive actually divides, and no other institution in education has to think about it.
A school photographs children who are in the building this year. A community college photographs adults who will be gone in eighteen months but are contactable. An advancement office holds material about people spanning six decades, some of whom write to you every year, some of whom moved abroad in 1979 and have never been heard from since, and some of whom were photographed by an institution that kept no record of asking them anything.
Those three groups need three different answers, and a product that offers one answer is offering it to the first group and hoping. The filter above exists because the distinction is the work.
The entry we marked as not ours
One of the six is the boxes in the basement, and it is marked as not turned on rather than described in a hopeful tense.
We are being emphatic about it because it is the part of your holdings with the most emotional and institutional weight, and a gallery product that let you assume it handled the boxes would be trading on exactly that. Digitising, cataloguing and rights-clearing a physical archive is specialist work with its own profession attached to it, and it is not what this platform does.
If the boxes are your actual problem, a conversation with an archivist will be worth considerably more to you than a conversation with us. That remains true after somebody has digitised them, at which point what you will have is a large collection of images of identifiable people with no record of anybody agreeing to anything — which is the point where this becomes relevant again.
The order we would work through it in
An office that adopts something like this and starts at the beginning of the archive will still be in 1961 when the next reunion cycle arrives. A more useful order runs the other way.
Start with what you actually reproduce. Most advancement offices reuse a surprisingly small set of images: a few dozen that appear in appeals, programmes and anniversary material year after year. Establishing agreements for those covers most of your real exposure, and it can be done in weeks rather than in years.
Then the current material, so the problem stops growing. Everything photographed this year is created under whatever practice you have now. If that practice does not record a decision, you are adding to the unresolved pile at the same rate you are clearing it, which is the position most offices are actually in.
Then the reachable cohorts, class year by class year. A reunion is the one moment a whole cohort is both present and pleased to be there, which makes it the cheapest opportunity your office will ever have to ask people directly. Offices that fold this into the reunion cycle stop having an archive problem within a decade rather than never.
Leave the unreachable material unresolved, deliberately. Not because it does not matter, but because pretending to resolve it is the failure. A collection you have honestly marked as unusable is in better shape than one somebody cleared in an afternoon to get a queue down.
Two things this catalogue deliberately does not sort by
Prominence. There is no filter for whether somebody became notable and there will not be one. An archive organised around who is worth featuring is organised around the institution’s interest rather than the subject’s, and the person most likely to object is precisely the one such a filter would surface first.
Quality. Nothing here ranks material by how good the photograph is, because that is a judgement your office should make slowly. A striking image of somebody who never agreed to anything is not more usable for being striking. It is more tempting, which is the opposite of the same thing.
What the two filters above do sort by — era, and whether the person can still be asked — are the two things that determine whether an agreement can be established at all. Those are constraints. Everything else is preference, and a catalogue that mixes the two teaches an office to treat its preferences as constraints.
What this catalogue is not
It is our description of our own capability. There are no photographs of any person on this site, no example records, no sample class lists and nothing resembling anybody’s real material. Nothing typed into the address bar reaches what you are reading.
A demonstration against your own holdings is a different thing: real setup work, after a conversation with a person, never before.