# Modern Graphic Design Archive — Source

Source documents the provenance, acquisition status, rights conditions, and research use of the materials incorporated into Modern Graphic Design Archive. It distinguishes original source material, scholarly evidence, project-normalized metadata, and internally generated research representations.

## Original source

Material as held, catalogued, or published by an external institution, author, or platform. Not stored or reproduced here except as evidence.

## Archive metadata

Project-normalized fields derived from a source record — a description of it, not a copy of it.

## Research evidence

Material used to support classification or an unresolved research inquiry, carried with its own status.

## TRACE interpretation

Validated associations and open inquiries produced by the project's research process. Downstream of, and never equal to, a source.

These four layers are kept distinct throughout the archive. The presence of a source does not imply that a historical claim built on it has been validated.

## Acquisition

Acquisition took place across 44 capture batches in 2026. Exact per-batch dates are recorded in the internal capture manifest.

Sources are treated as frozen snapshots at acquisition time. A later change at a source does not automatically re-sync into the archive; a new capture and a new release are required.

Every source carries a project role. A source used only as research evidence or design reference is marked as such and is not part of the object corpus.

## Rights

Rights are assessed per source and per kind of material. A source's descriptive metadata, the text it publishes, and any image it holds are three separate questions with three separate answers: a record can be fully citable while its image cannot be shown. The three columns set out what each assessment covers; the outcome for each source is carried in its register entry above.

The presence of an image at an external source does not constitute reproduction permission within Modern Graphic Design Archive. Current archive object pages do not assume image-display rights.

## Version and reproducibility

The archive is published as sealed releases, and everything on this site — the register above, the object pages, the search index — belongs to one of them. The ledger names the current release; the integrity record beneath it gives the identifiers and digests that bind this page to that release, so that what is shown today can be checked against the sealed inputs later.

Machine-readable manifests for the search index, context, spacetime, exploration, and open-inquiry projections are versioned and checksummed in the project repository. The values above bind what is shown today to a fixed release so it can be re-checked later.

[Full source register](https://mgdarchive.com/source)