For institutions
Institutional access & licensing
The catalogue is free, and the whole of it is free — not a sample, not a rate-limited trickle. What this page describes is a licence to build on the work the archive did on top of those records, and the service of being supported while you do. Those arrangements are what let public access stay free, unmetered, and free of advertising.
What is free, and stays free
None of the following is behind an agreement, a key, or a paywall, and none of it will be:
- Reading, searching, and citing every published source.
- The Historian — asking the corpus questions in English or Bengali.
- The public read API and OAI-PMH harvesting at ordinary volumes.
- The entire catalogue as a single dated file — JSONL or CSV, no key required.
- Persistent ARK identifiers, so citations keep resolving.
The catalogue is not a product held back from you. Take it now: catalogue.jsonl or catalogue.csv. A student, a journalist, or a family looking for a record should never meet a price.
Licensing the archive's own work
The archive does not license the source material, and could not.
Rights in every document, photograph, recording, and report remain with the people and publications that created them. The archive holds preservation copies and credits each one; that commitment is not ours to sell — which is also why the full text and the archival captures are not offered here in bulk at any price. If you need to reuse a source itself, its record names the rights holder to approach.
What the archive can license is what it made itself: the descriptive and interpretive layer over the sources, which took the labour that curation always takes.
Translations
English and Bengali renderings produced by the archive, including the faithful translations that accompany cross-lingual quotation — a bilingual corpus of the uprising that does not otherwise exist.
The curated chronology
The day-by-day timeline of July 2024 as the archive has assembled and dated it, with each entry tied to the sources that evidence it. The dating is the work; the sources are public.
Compiled datasets
Aggregations assembled by the archive across many sources, in forms suited to research, data journalism, and exhibition work.
Verification judgements
The editorial layer — what was checked, against what, and how confidently — carried as structured data rather than left implicit in a label.
Typically licensed to publishers, documentary producers, exhibitions, and research projects. Where a licence covers material that also appears in the public archive, the public version stays public.
Access as a service
For organisations working against the corpus continuously rather than reading it a record at a time. This is bought reliability, not privileged data — every record here is one anybody can already fetch.
Sustained access
Elevated, predictable request limits for pipelines that index, mirror, or query the corpus continuously — sized for machines rather than for the per-IP limits that protect a shared public service.
Incremental sync
Scheduled deltas so a local mirror stays current without re-harvesting everything, including withdrawals — so your copy honours a takedown as the archive does.
Continuity
A named contact, notice before the data shape changes, and a commitment to keep identifiers resolving. What an institution is really buying is that someone answers.
Preservation deposit
Support for memory institutions willing to hold an independent copy. An archive with one custodian has a single point of failure; we would rather it did not.
What it costs
There is no price list, because there is no standard request. A doctoral thesis, a national library, and a commercial data platform are asking for different things, and a figure that is modest in one country is prohibitive in another. So every arrangement is quoted individually, against what you actually need and what you are.
Two things that always hold: rates are set with local purchasing power in mind rather than a single dollar figure applied everywhere, and for researchers and institutions in Bangladesh they are nominal. The archive holds Bangladesh's own history; its price should not be highest for the people whose history it is.
What no arrangement buys
No agreement, licence, or payment confers any influence over what the archive holds, how a source is described, whether it is published, or how the Historian answers. Editorial independence and neutrality are the reason the archive is worth using at all, and they are not on offer at any price. The archive also does not accept funding from political parties or from any government while it documents them.
Enquiries
Everything here is arranged by email. Tell us who you are, what you need, and what you intend to do with it, and we will come back with terms for that request. If the free catalogue, the API, or OAI-PMH already covers it, we will say so rather than sell you something.