Who makes it

Mike Bommarito married into the island two decades ago, and he keeps this archive himself — the retrieval scripts, the transcription runs, the articles. When something here is wrong, it is his to fix.

Elsewhere he leads the Alea Institute and 273 Ventures and wrote This Is Server Country; his work, as he describes it, runs across food systems and agriculture, legal technology, artificial intelligence, open source and education. The scripting and machine transcription this archive is built on come from that side of it.

Almost nothing here was created by this archive. It is built on material other institutions collected, kept and published, and they are owed the credit: the Clarke Historical Library at Central Michigan University and its Digital Michigan Newspapers programme; the Library of Congress and Chronicling America; the Beaver Island Historical Society; the Internet Archive; NOAA's Office of Coast Survey; the USGS, the BLM, the National Park Service, the Census Bureau, the State of Michigan and Charlevoix County; and OpenStreetMap contributors. Naming them is not a claim of any arrangement with them — this archive works from what they publish openly, on the terms they publish it under. The bibliography says which of them holds each work, and what rights they attached to it.

One debt is particular. Helen Collar spent four decades transcribing parish registers, census returns, county death records and oral testimony onto index cards; Clarke Historical Library publishes that work. Her sacramental transcriptions are held here as a register, 1,616 dated records of the 1,913 transcribed, those published running 1796–1965. Each record cites itself and links back to her transcription; none of them is an encyclopedia article, because citing Collar citing a parish register is not citing the register. 22 records are withheld as sensitive, and her own hedges — "this must be", "probably", "I believe" — are counted and excluded rather than silently promoted into facts.