The editorial desk

Picdar is a small editorial operation covering one narrow beat: how photographs and other media reach a publication, how they are catalogued so that they can be found again, what the licence attached to them actually permits, and what happens to the whole library when the system holding it is replaced. It is written in the United Kingdom and in English, and the material is aimed at the people who do that work — picture editors, library and archive staff, rights teams and the developers who build for them.

The site is published by the editorial desk as a whole, not under personal bylines. Every page of new material carries the same signature, and that signature means a specific thing: someone on the desk wrote it, someone checked the figures and field names in it against the published standard or statute they came from, and the date shown on the page is the date that checking was last done. Where a claim could not be tied to a source, the claim is not on the page.

Photographs and archive scans carry their own credit where the original material named one. A credit line belongs to whoever took or supplied the picture and is reproduced as it was given; the desk does not attach its own name to somebody else’s frame.

This domain also holds the record of Picdar, the St Albans software company that supplied digital asset management systems to British publishing from 1984. Those pages are reproduced exactly as they were published on the company’s own site, and they are clearly marked as archive material wherever they appear. They are not edited, not corrected, not updated and not rewritten, because their value is that they are the record. A page that says something was true in 2005 is telling you what was said in 2005.

Corrections take priority over everything else here. If a figure, a date, a field name or an attribution in new material is wrong, write to the desk saying which page it is on and what the correct version should be. The page is amended and the change is noted on it. A factual dispute about an archive page is answered with a note rather than a change to the text, for the reason given above.

Editorial coverage is not for sale. Nothing in the editorial text is written, commissioned or angled in exchange for payment, and the desk does not take guest posts. Advertising placements, where they appear, sit outside the editorial text and carry no endorsement of what they point at.