Adding to the archive
The archive is not finished at handover. What is covered, what is commissioned, and how an addition runs.
An archive is built to be added to. Handover is the end of the first commission, not the end of the archive.
What is already covered
Under stewardship, at no charge:
- Corrections of any kind — a wrong date, a misspelled name, a rate that was right for the wrong year
- Anything broken, slow, or rendering badly
- Small factual additions that use material already furnished
If you are unsure which side of the line something falls on, ask. The studio will tell you it is covered rather than quote for it where that is the honest answer.
What is a new commission
The boundary is straightforward: new material coming in is quoted. New pages built from material already held are priced.
The five things that make something new rather than covered:
- A new interview or recorded conversation
- Materials that have not been furnished before — a box from an estate, a set of photographs a sibling had
- A period of the honoree's life the archive does not yet cover
- A second person brought into the archive
- A new section that requires research the studio has not already done
Story debt
Every conversation surfaces more than one archive can hold. What did not make the build is not discarded — it is recorded against your account as material still waiting to be written.
You will hear about it. A stewardship note may say that you once mentioned the homecoming in Rota and it is still unwritten. That is not a sales approach. It is the studio remembering something you said and thought nobody wrote down.
Milestones
Anything you name at intake as a known future event — a child's commissioning, a fiftieth anniversary, a reunion the honoree has been going to for thirty years — is recorded.
The studio raises it before the date, not after, so there is time to prepare the chapter properly rather than assemble it in a fortnight.
Modules
Some additions are specific to the honoree's community rather than to the individual: a section that only makes sense for that rating, that designator, or that kind of work.
These are researched once and offered where they fit. They are offered as counsel, when they are right for a particular archive, and not presented as a list to shop from.
How an addition runs
A short conversation
Narrower than the original one, and usually shorter. Enough to establish what the addition is actually about.
Built and shown
The new section is built and walked through with you before it goes on the archive.
Recorded
The addition gets its own line in your archive's log, with its date. Twenty years from now that log reads as a record of when the family added what.
Every addition is treated as an occasion rather than an update pushed quietly overnight. Nothing about your archive changes without you knowing.