How to Use the Archive

This page explains how to use the archive — finding material, reading it, and taking it with you. Everything described here works without an account and without any special knowledge. If you can use a search engine, you can use this archive.

1. What This Archive Holds

The archive keeps six kinds of material: articles (written pieces), audio (recordings and podcasts), video, documents (PDFs, scans, papers), images (photographs and graphics), and datasets (structured data you can download and work with). Every single piece — whether a photograph, a recording, or a report — has its own page with a description, the file itself, and everything you need to find it again or quote it. An archive built with this software can hold anything from a handful of records to millions; what you see here is this installation's own collection.

2. Searching: One Field Finds Everything

The search field sits at the top of every page. Type what you are looking for and press Go — the archive searches the full text of every published record: titles, descriptions, summaries, notes, and the text of articles. You do not need to know where something is filed; one field reaches everything.

Next to the field there is a small dropdown that says Everything. Leave it as it is to search the whole archive, or open it to limit the search to one kind of material — only audio, only documents, and so on. That is often the fastest way to cut a large result list down.

A search for a common word can return a lot. This is where the filters on the results page come in — the archive calls them facets. Every record is classified along several axes, and each axis appears next to your results with its most frequent values and a live count of how many hits each value would leave:

Subject — the topics a record is about.
Place — the geographic locations it relates to.
Language — the language of the record's content.
Contributor — the people involved: authors, speakers, photographers.
Genre — the kind of material: testimony, analysis, report, and so on.
Part of — the larger work a record belongs to.
Collection and Series — curated groupings kept by the archive.
Access — whether a record is public or members-only.

Click a value and the result list narrows immediately. Filters from different axes combine freely: for example, all audio records in German on the subject education. Every active filter is shown as a small removable chip above the results — click its × and that filter is gone again. You can never get lost: the chips always show exactly what is currently narrowing your view.

4. Browsing Instead of Searching

You do not have to start with a search word. Where a filter axis holds more values than the sidebar can show, you can open the full alphabetical index of that axis and browse it letter by letter — every subject, every place, every contributor in the archive, each with its record count. Pick a value and you are looking at its records. The tiles on the home page are entry points too: they lead to the main sections of the site.

5. Reading a Record Page

Open any result and you get the full picture on one page: a description of what it is, the file itself — played directly in the page for audio and video, shown for images, offered for download for documents and datasets — plus who made it, when and where it belongs, what larger work it is part of, and related records worth seeing next. The classifications on a record page are links: click a subject or a place there and you jump straight to everything else filed under it.

Every record carries a stable link that never changes — a bookmark or a link you paste into a paper will still work tomorrow, and next year. For quoting, each record page offers a ready-made citation in Chicago, APA, or MLA form: copy the one your school, university, or publisher expects. Documents are designed to leave the screen — what you download or print is meant to be usable in the real world.

7. Reading in Your Own Language

The language switcher — the 🌐 button at the top right — lists every language this site has been translated into. These translations are made by the archive's own keepers, not by a machine or an outside service: choosing a language simply reloads the page in that language, right here on this site, under its own address (German pages live under /de/…, for example), and nothing about your visit is sent anywhere else. Which languages appear depends on the language packs this installation has installed; English is the original, and wherever a translation has a gap, the English text fills in. One exception: legal documents always stay in the language the archive's operator issued them in. The archive's content comes in many languages too — the Language facet lets you pull up everything held in a particular one with a single click, and right-to-left scripts such as Arabic or Hebrew display correctly throughout.

8. The Member Area, Briefly

Reading, searching, downloading, citing — none of it needs an account. The member area exists for people who help build the archive: members prepare new records in a guided workroom, describe and classify them, upload the files, and hand them to review before anything is published. Anyone can register for a basic membership; research access can be requested from within the member area, and the curating roles are given personally by the archive's keepers. If you only want to read, you never need any of this.

9. If Something Does Not Work

If a link is broken, a search behaves oddly, or a page will not load, please tell us — the contact channels are listed in the footer of every page. This archive is kept by people, not by a corporation, and we read what reaches us.