About

Abandoned Archive is a research archive for documentarians and historians who study abandoned, forgotten, and at-risk places. We collect primary-source evidence -- photographs, maps, public records, oral histories -- and organize it into citable location reports.

What we do

Each location in the archive starts as scattered evidence: a folder of photos, a deed, a newspaper clipping, coordinates on a map. We verify, cross-reference, and structure that evidence into a permanent record. The database is the single source of truth. Evidence files live on archival storage, not in a CMS.

Ethics

We do not publish street addresses, GPS coordinates precise enough to navigate to a site, or information that could facilitate trespassing or vandalism. Location data is generalized to the municipality level on the public site. The full archive is access-controlled and available only to vetted contributors.

Faces and license plates in photographs are automatically detected and redacted before any image is made public. We respect privacy even when documenting places that appear abandoned.

How it works

• Evidence is ingested from NAS storage and processed by a pipeline of workers: thumbnails, OCR, text extraction, address validation, redaction.
• Locations are reviewed and enriched by contributors using the internal Operator app.
• When a location is ready, it is published through a formal release process that controls exactly which data appears on the public site.
• This site is statically generated from the database at build time. No runtime database connection, no API exposed, no user accounts.

Contact

For research inquiries, corrections, or access requests, contact the project maintainers via the archive's internal channels.