Not everything here is evidence.
Some of it is a Tuesday in Frederiksted in 1954. The Vault is where you go to find a document; this is where you go to read one. The papers page by page, the photographs and the maps, the films and the recordings — arranged by when they happened, because that is the one thing they all have in common.
Two centuries, and what we hold of them
Bars are drawn on a log scale, so a decade holding one item still shows one. A decade with no bar is a decade we hold nothing from — drawn, not omitted.
Open on the table
Reading the shelf…
What is in the room
The Independent Citizens Movement
Reading the shelf…
On the shelves today: one complete newspaper run and a six-issue sample of another. Waiting to be brought in, already scanned and read by machine: four more mastheads reaching back to 1865 and forward to 1995. Beyond those sit four Danish-era papers, 1770 to 1885, which we will index and never copy — the Royal Danish Library holds those, and says so on every page.
Counted at publish