For twenty-eight years this archive grew the way archives grow: quietly, page by page, place by place. It began in 1998 as beniculturalionline.it, an Italian index of monuments and museums, built in the years when the cultural web was mostly lists and good intentions. It has been online ever since. Under this name and at this address it has published since 2002 — the Internet Archive keeps a copy of this site dated 19 January of that year.
An archive can afford to be quiet. A publication cannot. Over the past year the magazine side of Cultural Heritage Online has come to look and behave like a periodical: new articles every day, a front page that leads with a story rather than a sales pitch, and citations that arrive unasked — The Guardian, National Geographic, Hyperallergic, and five language editions of Wikipedia list our records among their references. With that growth comes an obligation a catalogue never faces. Someone has to answer, by name, for what is published.
This week we put the answer in writing, on four pages most websites never bother to build.
There is now a masthead. It carries my name, because the responsibility is mine: I edit this publication and I publish it. Articles signed Cultural Heritage Online are produced by the editorial desk under my direction, checked against the protocol in our Editorial Guidelines, and I answer for every one of them. Photography is credited on each image. Community contributions are reviewed before publication and credited where they appear.
There is a corrections policy. It says something simple that took a long time to write down: when we get a fact wrong — a date, an attribution, a coordinate — we will fix it and add a dated note at the foot of the page saying what changed. We will not quietly rewrite our mistakes. An archive earns trust over decades and can lose it in one uncorrected error. If you find one, use the contact page and begin your message with “Correction”. You will be doing this publication a service.
And there is an ownership disclosure. Cultural Heritage Online is published by OASIS Tech LLC, a privately held United States company, with no outside investors and no government funding. The publication lives on memberships, on venue partnerships, and on clearly labelled guest content. Coverage is not for sale: the catalogue documents thousands of places that have never paid us anything, and never will. Readers deserve to know who pays for what they read. Now it is on the record.
Why does a heritage archive need any of this? Because provenance is becoming the scarcest resource on the web. Text is cheap now. There has never been more of it, and there has never been less certainty about where it comes from. The answer this publication can give is old-fashioned: names, dates, sources, and a standing invitation to be corrected. It is the same discipline that makes a catalogue worth consulting after twenty-eight years, applied to everything else we do.
One more thing changed this week, and it is an invitation. Cultural Heritage Online now has a public collaboration programme with three tracks: photographers, writers, and tour operators. The terms are on those pages, and two of them are worth repeating here because they define the kind of publication this is. First: nobody pays to publish here. Editorial space is not for sale, and a pitch is judged on merit. Second: where money is involved, the terms are fixed and stated in advance — photographers keep the full sale price of their licences minus payment processing, and writers on commissioned work receive a fixed share, published on the page, with no bidding and no negotiating down.
To the writers in particular: this magazine has run for years on a desk byline. That was honest — the masthead now explains exactly what it means — but a publication about places needs voices that have stood in them. If you have walked a city for its Liberty facades, catalogued the chapels nobody visits, or spent a career explaining buildings to people who hurry past them, we would like to read you. Three published articles carry practical weight here: recognition, a year of the platform’s professional tools, and priority on paid assignments. Your byline appears over your own name, on a publication whose records are cited by newspapers you already read.
This column will appear when there is something worth saying about how the publication is run — not on a schedule, and never as filler. The archive will keep doing what it has done since 1998: adding places, checking coordinates, crediting photographers, correcting what needs correcting. The difference, from this week, is that you know exactly who answers for it.
Luigi De Marchi, architect, is the editor and publisher of Cultural Heritage Online.
Note: the Internet Archive’s first stored copy of culturalheritageonline.com is dated 19 January 2002.