Notes on Archival Annotation Practices

Each entry in the archive carries a small set of annotations. The conventions used are unremarkable, but consistency matters more than the specific choices.

Annotation is the discipline of attaching, to each entry, the small set of information that supports its later retrieval and citation. Excessive annotation is a familiar failure: entries become buried in metadata that no later reader, including the author, will read. Too little annotation is a different failure: an entry that cannot be retrieved is, in effect, lost.

What is recorded

For each entry the archive records: a title; a publication date, defined as the date on which the entry was first considered stable; a modification date, recorded only when the underlying material has been substantively revised; and a small set of topical tags, drawn from a controlled vocabulary that is updated rarely and reluctantly.

What is not recorded is, in practice, more important. Categorical tags drawn from open vocabularies tend to drift; assigning them retrospectively becomes a source of subtle classification error. Free-form notes attached to entries tend to accumulate revisions of their own, which themselves require annotation. The discipline of limiting annotation to a small fixed schema is part of the practice that allows the archive to remain useful at low maintenance cost.

Modification dates

A modification date is added only when the substantive content of an entry has been revised. Typographical corrections, link adjustments, and similar housekeeping operations are not recorded. The principle is that a modification date is a signal to a returning reader: the material you previously read has changed. A reader who relied on an earlier reading should expect to encounter different prose this time.

Cosmetic changes do not carry this implication, and recording them as modifications would dilute the signal until it ceased to be useful.

Tag vocabulary

The tag vocabulary is small (a few dozen terms) and is added to sparingly. Each new tag is chosen with the expectation that it will apply to several future entries. The temptation to introduce a tag for a single entry is firmly resisted: such tags do not survive the following review.

The full list of tags appears on the topics page. The most heavily used tags reflect the recurrent themes of the archive — methodology, archival practice, observation, reference.