Finding candidates
Candidates come from official announcements, creator interviews, institutional collections, public records, specialist archives and reliable reporting. Community discussions can reveal a lead, but do not establish a central claim by themselves.
Verification standard
Core claims should be supported by an original or institutional source where available, or by multiple independent reliable sources. Each source receives a visible evidence tier. Dates, access status and lifecycle stages are recorded separately so uncertainty in one claim does not contaminate the entire entry.
Automation and editorial judgement
Software and AI-assisted tools may help find candidates, extract dates, detect duplicates and normalise research into a consistent structure. They do not turn an unsupported claim into a fact. Published pages retain source links, confidence labels, classification reasoning and a verification date so the work can be inspected.
Updates and corrections
An archive can change when a prototype is recovered, a project is revived or a better source appears. We update the timeline, classification and last confirmed trace when new evidence materially changes the record. The page's verification date shows when the research was last reviewed.
Found a factual problem or a stronger primary source? Contact the project through The Almost Archive profile and include the archive URL and supporting source.
Classification
The three states and How Close score follow a published decision tree rather than tone or intuition. See the full research method →