Editorial Policy

Awesome Digital History is a curated directory for digital history research, teaching, and source discovery. The policy below explains how resources are selected, reviewed, updated, and removed.

Editorial Responsibility

The project is maintained by Moritz Maehr with contributions from the wider digital history community. Editorial decisions should be transparent and traceable through GitHub issues, pull requests, and entry metadata.

Maintainers are responsible for applying this policy consistently, but contributors are welcome to propose additions, corrections, updates, and removals.

Inclusion Criteria

Listed resources should meet all of these baseline criteria:

  • The resource supports historical research, source criticism, teaching, or digital history practice.
  • The resource is available online and has a stable public URL.
  • The entry can be described accurately with the directory metadata fields.
  • The resource adds value beyond a single short-lived announcement, event page, or marketing page.
  • The resource can be maintained with reasonable effort by the project community.

Archive and primary-source entries should provide access to digitized or described historical sources, collection search, finding aids, or source portals.

Learning entries should teach methods, tools, theory, or practices that are useful for historians or digital humanities practitioners.

Tools and meta-lists should be directly useful for research, writing, data work, discovery, preservation, publication, or teaching in digital history contexts.

Exclusion Criteria

Resources may be declined when they match one or more of these conditions:

  • The resource is unrelated to history, archives, cultural heritage, or digital research workflows.
  • The resource is offline, inaccessible, abandoned without useful archived content, or only available through unstable links.
  • The resource is primarily promotional, commercial, or event-focused without durable research value.
  • The resource duplicates an existing entry without adding meaningful coverage, language, access, or methodological value.
  • The resource cannot be described or reviewed accurately with public information.
  • The resource creates legal, privacy, safety, or ethical concerns that make listing inappropriate.

Subscription, freemium, or institutional-access resources are not automatically excluded, but their access limits should be clear in the entry when known.

Review Criteria

Maintainers review proposed additions and changes for:

  • Scope fit and research usefulness.
  • Accuracy of title, URL, description, metadata, screenshot, and entry text.
  • Basic link stability and public accessibility.
  • Clear distinction between collection coverage, maintaining institution, and language metadata.
  • Potential bias, selection limits, access restrictions, unclear provenance, and reuse constraints where known.
  • Provenance fields such as date added, review status, authors, reviewers, and contributors.

Review does not mean that maintainers endorse every external resource, verify every item inside a collection, or guarantee long-term availability.

AI-Assisted Workflows

AI tools may support drafting, summarizing, metadata cleanup, screenshots, validation, or site production. AI-assisted output must be checked by a human editor before it is treated as reviewed.

If AI-assisted text has been checked by a human editor, the entry should record reviewed_at and reviewed_by where this information is known.

Contributors should not submit AI-generated descriptions without checking them against the source website. AI text must not invent features, coverage, dates, access conditions, licenses, APIs, institutions, or historical claims.

Updates And Deprecation

Entries should be updated when URLs change, collections move, access conditions change, metadata becomes inaccurate, screenshots are stale, or better context becomes available.

An entry may be marked for review or removal when the resource is no longer available, no longer in scope, misleading, duplicated, or impossible to maintain accurately.

Removal Criteria

Maintainers may remove entries when:

  • The resource is permanently offline and no useful replacement or archived access is available.
  • The resource no longer matches the directory scope.
  • The entry duplicates a better maintained or more authoritative listing.
  • The resource raises unresolved ethical, legal, privacy, or safety concerns.
  • The entry cannot be maintained with accurate public information.

Removal requests should explain the reason and, when possible, suggest alternatives or archived versions.

Contributor Credit

The GitHub contributors graph records repository activity. Entry-level authors, contributors, reviewed_by, date_added, and review fields provide more specific editorial provenance when this information can be verified.

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