Source
Provenance, rights, and research use of the archive’s materials.
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.
Source overview
Four layers, kept distinct
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.
Source register
Each source carries what it is — its source type — and what the project does with it — its project role — as separate properties, so different kinds of material are not flattened into one bibliography.
Archives & Collections21
Institutional catalogues and collections. Their metadata supports object description, attribution, and dating. Object imagery is not reproduced.
Show 21 sources
- Coverage
- French posters, advertising, typography, printing, periodicals, public-domain visual documents.
- Material
- Catalogue records · IIIF image routes
- Contribution
- 239 records
- Identifier
- gallica.bnf.fr
- Acquired
- 2026 capture batches
- Rights
- SRU dc:rights and the Gallica / BnF item page are the controlling evidence. Public-domain signals may support an open-image state; otherwise imagery remains source-hosted.
- Status
- Verified source
- Coverage
- Twentieth-century and contemporary design-object records: types, makers, dates.
- Material
- Collection metadata · image routes (manual review)
- Contribution
- 137 records
- Identifier
- collection.cooperhewitt.org
- Acquired
- 2026 capture batches
- Rights
- Treated as source-hosted imagery pending manual review; the ledger marks source role, fields, and rights dependency as requiring review.
- Status
- Verified source
- Coverage
- Poster and design-adjacent records; an open-license image supplement, not an original holding archive.
- Material
- extmetadata · licence fields · category-tree captures
- Contribution
- Open-image expansions (authority-weighted, category-tree, region-balanced)
- Identifier
- commons.wikimedia.org
- Acquired
- 2026 capture batches
- Rights
- Commons extmetadata licence fields control admission. Only open-license records are admitted as open-image candidates; uncertainty is retained because metadata can be user-supplied.
- Status
- Verified source
- Coverage
- Public-health, exhibition, poster, print, and design-adjacent catalogue records with strong rights fields.
- Material
- Catalogue work records · thumbnail / IIIF routes
- Contribution
- 89 records
- Identifier
- wellcomecollection.org
- Acquired
- 2026 capture batches
- Rights
- Wellcome item licence / access fields control image state. Media availability alone is not sufficient for reproduction.
- Status
- Verified source
- Coverage
- Labor, civil-rights, theatre, newspaper, urban, and public print-culture records.
- Material
- singleitem fields · local rights statements · IIIF routes
- Contribution
- 85 records
- Identifier
- digitalcollections.library.gsu.edu
- Acquired
- 2026 capture batches
- Rights
- The item-level local rights statement controls display. CONTENTdm / IIIF availability is source-hosted evidence, not an open reuse grant.
- Status
- Verified source
- Coverage
- Prints, posters, WPA / FSA material, trade cards, pamphlets, catalogue records, rights advisories.
- Material
- PPOC records · rights advisories · image / thumbnail fields
- Contribution
- 50 records
- Identifier
- loc.gov
- Acquired
- 2026 capture batches
- Rights
- The item-level rights advisory is authoritative. No universal public-domain assumption is made for Library of Congress records.
- Status
- Verified source
- Coverage
- Museum object records for posters, prints, and publications; artist metadata; IIIF identifiers.
- Material
- Artwork records · is_public_domain flag · IIIF identifiers
- Contribution
- 45 records
- Identifier
- artic.edu
- Acquired
- 2026 capture batches
- Rights
- AIC is_public_domain and item-page evidence control promotion. IIIF identifiers alone do not authorize display.
- Status
- Verified source
- Coverage
- Design-object and collection metadata for posters, prints, ephemera, makers, and object types.
- Material
- System-number records · image fields · rights / credit
- Contribution
- 44 records
- Identifier
- collections.vam.ac.uk
- Acquired
- 2026 capture batches
- Rights
- V&A item rights and image-permission statements control display. Image presence is not reuse permission.
- Status
- Verified source
- Coverage
- Posters, broadsides, banners, advertising print, scanned visual resources, ephemera.
- Material
- Catalogue records · manifest licences · IIIF services
- Contribution
- 41 records
- Identifier
- figgy.princeton.edu
- Acquired
- 2026 capture batches
- Rights
- Manifest licence and the Princeton source page control display. Explicit public-domain / CC0 signals may promote; otherwise imagery remains source-hosted.
- Status
- Verified source
- Coverage
- Posters, protest graphics, music-publicity print, and public visual communication outside the European / North American canon.
- Material
- Object records · preview-image routes · media rights fields
- Contribution
- 32 records
- Identifier
- tepapa.govt.nz
- Acquired
- 2026 capture batches
- Rights
- Preview images are treated as restricted / source-hosted. No local copy or reuse claim is made.
- Status
- Verified source
- Coverage
- Scanned books, manuals, periodicals, OCR text, and bibliographic context.
- Material
- Item metadata · file lists · OCR text
- Contribution
- 30 records
- Identifier
- archive.org
- Acquired
- 2026 capture batches
- Rights
- Collection and item terms vary. OCR is a discovery layer; strong claims require page / image verification or a stable citation basis.
- Status
- Verified source
- Coverage
- Annual NAIDOC Indigenous Australian poster records.
- Material
- Poster item records · source-hosted image / PDF routes
- Contribution
- 26 records
- Identifier
- naidoc.org.au
- Acquired
- 2026 capture batches
- Rights
- Treated as source-hosted, with cultural and rights caution. No local copy or reuse claim is made.
- Status
- Verified source
- Coverage
- Periodical, advertising, newspaper, and public visual communication records from Aotearoa New Zealand.
- Material
- Aggregated records · rights / usage fields · thumbnails
- Contribution
- 21 records
- Identifier
- digitalnz.org
- Acquired
- 2026 capture batches
- Rights
- DigitalNZ rights / usage fields plus the partner landing page control display. Open-image state requires open-enough item-level signals.
- Status
- Verified source
- Coverage
- Museum object records and an open-access / public-domain comparison layer.
- Material
- Object records · open-access / public-domain flags
- Contribution
- 15 records
- Identifier
- metmuseum.org
- Acquired
- 2026 capture batches
- Rights
- Met Open Access and public-domain fields are reviewed per item before an image is treated as open.
- Status
- Verified source
- Coverage
- Open-access museum object records with lower-risk image examples.
- Material
- Object records · share / licence fields
- Contribution
- 12 records
- Identifier
- clevelandart.org
- Acquired
- 2026 capture batches
- Rights
- Open-access / licence fields are reviewed at item level before an image is treated as open.
- Status
- Verified source
- Coverage
- Chilean political poster, mural, and movement print culture.
- Material
- Bibliographic records · source image routes
- Contribution
- 3 records
- Identifier
- bibliotecanacionaldigital.gob.cl
- Acquired
- 2026 capture batches
- Rights
- Images are treated as source-hosted unless an explicit open licence is separately verified.
- Status
- Verified source
- Coverage
- Bibliographic and digitized design-history support records.
- Material
- Bibliographic metadata · access links
- Contribution
- 3 records
- Identifier
- portal.getty.edu
- Acquired
- 2026 capture batches
- Rights
- Portal and contributing-institution terms govern use. Used primarily as bibliographic / context evidence.
- Status
- Reference only
- Coverage
- Anti-apartheid, Medu, labor, and resistance poster histories.
- Material
- Item pages · rights statements · preview-image routes
- Contribution
- 3 records
- Identifier
- saha.org.za
- Acquired
- 2026 capture batches
- Rights
- SAHA item pages warn that copyright may be held by postermakers or organisations; imagery remains source-hosted with no local copy.
- Status
- Verified source
- Coverage
- NAIDOC poster history and collection-level poster routes.
- Material
- Collection pages · scope notes · source text
- Contribution
- 2 records
- Identifier
- aiatsis.gov.au
- Acquired
- 2026 capture batches
- Rights
- Collection pages retained as context unless reliable item-level image evidence is extracted and reviewed.
- Status
- Reference only
- Coverage
- Multilingual signs, commercial objects, and everyday public graphic systems in Singapore.
- Material
- Object records · image routes · source descriptions
- Contribution
- 2 records
- Identifier
- roots.gov.sg
- Acquired
- 2026 capture batches
- Rights
- Object images are treated as source-hosted; no local copy or reuse claim is made.
- Status
- Verified source
- Coverage
- Chinese political and campaign graphics.
- Material
- Item / theme records · rights notes
- Contribution
- 1 record
- Identifier
- chineseposters.net
- Acquired
- 2026 capture batches
- Rights
- Specialist-archive terms control the record. The surface remains link-only unless item display permission is explicit.
- Status
- Verified source
Scholarly Research2
Research registers and methodology material. These support classification and unresolved inquiry; they do not validate a historical claim by their presence.
Show 2 sources
- Coverage
- Eleven scoped higher-order association hypotheses relevant to unresolved research inquiry.
- Material
- Structured hypothesis records with bounded scope, participants, and provenance
- Identifier
- Internal registry · 11 scoped records
- Acquired
- 2026 · Round 16B integration
- Rights
- Project research output. Records are read-only and carry explicit non-claim status.
- Status
- Open inquiry evidence
- Coverage
- Production rulebook, evidence protocol, capture-period strategy, image / text enrichment rules.
- Material
- Written methodology and rulebook documents
- Identifier
- Repository — docs/methodology/
- Acquired
- 2026 · versioned with the release
- Rights
- Project-authored research output; no blanket reuse licence.
- Status
- Reference only
Datasets & Standards3
Project-generated governed datasets, controlled vocabularies, and reference standards that define how source material is projected.
Show 3 sources
- Coverage
- The sealed public projection: 7,995 public documents; 16,106 context representations; 23 periods; 93 geographies; 21 validated associations; 11 open inquiries.
- Material
- Deterministic read models generated from the frozen database
- Identifier
- Search v2 · Context v1 · Spacetime v1 · Exploration v2 · Open Inquiry v1
- Acquired
- Generated with release v49
- Rights
- Project-generated. Machine-readable manifests are versioned and checksummed (see §7).
- Status
- Public record
- Coverage
- 90 object types · 8 themes · 7 movements · 93 geographies · 23 decade periods · 25 context terms.
- Material
- Closed dictionaries bound to the release
- Identifier
- Object type · Theme · Movement · Geography · Period · Context term
- Acquired
- Fixed by the v49 projection
- Rights
- Project-defined. Values derive from public source records; no inferred aliases.
- Status
- Public record
- Coverage
- Applied to titles, credited labels, places, and identifiers for matching and exact lookup; display form is preserved.
- Material
- Normalization algorithm (standard)
- Identifier
- Unicode Normalization Forms
- Acquired
- Standard, applied at index build
- Rights
- Open standard.
- Status
- Reference only
Design References7
Design-history and typographic precedents that shape the interface's visual language. They are not historical-evidence sources and take no part in archive object validation.
Show 7 sources
- Coverage
- One announced idea per cover; a limited, luminous palette; a single graphic device repeated with rhythm.
- Material
- Historical precedent — not held or reproduced
- Identifier
- Interface visual language only
- Acquired
- Cited as design influence
- Rights
- Referenced for design methodology. Does not participate in archive object validation.
- Status
- Reference only
- Coverage
- Colour as abstract field; painted blocks carrying the cover, with type set small beside them. The plates.
- Material
- Historical precedent — not held or reproduced
- Identifier
- Interface visual language only
- Acquired
- Cited as design influence
- Rights
- Referenced for design methodology. Not an object-evidence source.
- Status
- Reference only
- Coverage
- Cartoon-modern crowds: figures reduced to dots and lines, packed into a field. The homepage's field and crowd.
- Material
- Historical precedent — not held or reproduced
- Identifier
- Interface visual language only
- Acquired
- Cited as design influence
- Rights
- Referenced for design methodology. Not an object-evidence source.
- Status
- Reference only
- Coverage
- Colour as a field, not a rule; one oversized figure cropped by its frame; a name set larger than its plate; a small line-drawn device.
- Material
- Historical precedent — not held or reproduced
- Identifier
- Interface visual language only
- Acquired
- Cited as design influence
- Rights
- Referenced for design methodology. Does not participate in archive object validation.
- Status
- Reference only
- Coverage
- Figures reduced to a head and a body on a grid; a crowd drawn as marks.
- Material
- Historical precedent — not held or reproduced
- Identifier
- Interface visual language only
- Acquired
- Cited as design influence
- Rights
- Referenced for design methodology. Not an object-evidence source.
- Status
- Reference only
- Coverage
- A circle rendered by lines, by dots, and by a lit engraving; white line on black. The homepage's opening studies.
- Material
- Genre precedent — not held or reproduced
- Identifier
- Interface visual language only
- Acquired
- Cited as design influence
- Rights
- Referenced for design methodology. Not an object-evidence source.
- Status
- Reference only
- Coverage
- A heavy rounded grotesque for titles and numerals; a plain grotesque for reading on a 17px floor; a transitional serif for the wordmark's second line and set-apart statements.
- Material
- Typefaces
- Identifier
- Interface use only
- Acquired
- Cited as design influence
- Rights
- Typefaces used under their own open licences (SIL Open Font License). Not an object-evidence source.
- Status
- Reference only
Provenance & acquisition
Nothing is published from a raw capture. Every record you can read here has passed the chain below, and each source is held as a frozen snapshot at the moment it was acquired.
Acquisition methods (7)
Official read APIs (SRU, REST, GraphQL) where a source provides one.
Harvesting endpoints and image manifests for catalogue and image routes.
Parsed capture of stable item pages where no API exists; raw payload preserved.
Bulk open datasets and open-image sets, admitted only under item-level licence signals.
Governed exports from the project's own frozen database.
Hand-entered records for targets with no machine-readable route; flagged for review.
Bibliographic and context evidence extracted from literature; not an object corpus.
- 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.
Editorial & data transformation
Database fields are not found in nature. Source values are reshaped into consistent fields; normalizing a value is describing it, not inferring something the source did not state.
Transformation is not inference. Normalizing “München” to a Place field is description. Expanding a city to a country the source did not state, or asserting a movement the source did not record, is not permitted. Where the project adds an interpretation, it is marked as project inference, not presented as source content.
Transformation categories (8)
Source place “München” → field: Place = München (form preserved; not expanded).
A stable public surface ID is assigned; the internal identifier is never exposed.
Date text → numeric year bounds for interval comparison; prose dates are not inferred.
Records sharing a source locator are merged or held; the decision is recorded.
Source type strings → the closed object-type dictionary; distinct source values stay distinct.
Records without complete source, rights, or citation evidence are held, not published.
Source citation fields are formatted consistently; the original identifier is retained.
Unicode NFC / NFKC and safe diacritic folding for matching; display text is unchanged.
Rights & permissions
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.
Metadata
Descriptive fields (title, credited label, date, place, object type) are used for description, search, and citation under each source's metadata terms or open-data licence. Normalized metadata is a project research output; reuse must preserve source attribution and any uncertainty.
Text & citation
Source text is quoted only within each source's citation and quotation conditions. OCR and catalogue description are treated as discovery aids until verified against a page image or a stable citation basis.
Visual material
Image reproduction rights are assessed per item against the holding source. A public webpage is not a public-domain image, and accessible metadata is not image-reproduction permission. The current release holds zero positive visual-rights records; object pages show no image.
Evidence & source status
Each entry in the register carries one status. It records how far the project has verified the source itself — its identity and the relevant record — and how it may be used, not whether anything built on it holds. A status is fixed with the release it belongs to; like any other change at a source, a change of status requires a new capture and a new release.
- Verified source
- Source identity and the relevant record have been directly verified.
- Public record
- Eligible for public archive presentation in the current release.
- Held
- Retained internally but excluded from the public projection pending complete evidence.
- Open inquiry evidence
- Relevant to an unresolved research inquiry; explicitly not a validated result.
- Reference only
- Used for methodology or design context, not as archive object evidence.
A source appearing in this register means the material exists and has been recorded. It does not mean that a TRACE association or historical relation built with it has been validated. Validation status is carried separately, in TRACE.
Version & 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.
- Archive release
- v49 — current public release (sealed)
- Source register version
- Compiled with the v49 release, 2026
- Last verified
- 2026, with the v49 freeze
- Source treatment
- Frozen snapshots; no automatic re-sync
Integrity record
- Release
- v49-api-contract-fresh-c
- Immutable source anchor
- v49-data-api-closure-20260821
- Canonical population input
- generated/public_surfaces_prefreeze_candidate_v48.json
- Input SHA-256
- b16bb0158c3ea27cee2909e96631ab84f3c8f6d0356476e45e641eb27edb4f48
- Projection content digest
- e7ab41633b481d455bc3ceab3e2d0d2a1d5410b186b65bfb2697059182d1b49d
- Schema SHA-256
- df1e7741e59e5e6bf1ca80f2a33edfad1abb2fc6d95b57d4d6993b49917020dd
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.
Source citation
Cite the original source first, with its most stable identifier (DOI, ISBN, archive catalogue ID, or collection ID). Then, where the archive's normalization is relied on, cite the archive provenance record. For how to cite the archive as a whole, see About.
[Institution or author]. [Title or collection]. [Stable identifier: DOI / ISBN / catalogue ID / collection ID]. Accessed [date].
Modern Graphic Design Archive. Source record [source name], release v49. https://mgdarchive.com/source