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Abantu Archives – AI Use & Data Licensing Policy

AI Use & Data Licensing Policy

Abantu Archives — last updated 21 August 2026

Overview

Abantu Archives makes its Master Catalogue — metadata describing the historical records, periodicals, and documents in our collection — available for research and discovery. This policy sets out what that access permits, and what it doesn’t.

This page governs use of:

  • The catalogue metadata (titles, authors, dates, subjects, accession numbers, and related fields) as published through the Collection Explorer, Timeline, and our public data exports.
  • Written commentary, profile essays, and contextual material we publish on this site.

It does not govern the underlying historical items themselves — the original documents, periodicals, and photographs in our collection carry their own, separate copyright status. Many are held in the public domain, some remain rights-uncertain, and a small number are rights-restricted. Where we know the position for a specific item, we state it on that item’s own record. Absence of a statement is not a claim that an item is free to use.

What’s permitted

You’re welcome to:

  • Search, browse, and cite individual records for research, study, journalism, or personal reference.
  • Quote or reference our own written commentary (profile essays, contextual notes) with attribution, in the way you’d cite any published source.
  • Link directly to records, pages, or search results on this site.
  • Query the catalogue programmatically at a reasonable, individual scale — for example, looking up a handful of specific records for a research project.

What requires written permission first

  • Bulk reuse or redistribution of catalogue metadata — downloading, copying, or republishing the dataset (or a substantial portion of it) elsewhere.
  • Inclusion in machine-learning training sets — using catalogue metadata, our written commentary, or site content to train, fine-tune, or evaluate an AI model of any kind, whether for commercial or research purposes.
  • Systematic or automated scraping of the site beyond ordinary individual search and browsing.
  • Republishing our own written content (profile essays, commentary, contextual notes) as your own or without attribution.

To request permission for any of the above, get in touch with a description of the intended use, scope, and purpose. We review requests individually — the position depends on scale, purpose, and whether the use aligns with the archive’s own mission.

Why this policy exists

Abantu Archives exists because African historical material has too often been stored, cited, and interpreted by frameworks outside African control. That principle extends to how our own curatorial work — the research, contextualisation, and metadata structure built into this catalogue — gets used. Bulk extraction into a third-party dataset or AI training pipeline, without agreement, repeats the pattern this project was built to push back against, regardless of the extracting party’s intent.

This isn’t a blanket refusal. Collaboration with researchers, institutions, and aligned projects is welcome — see Contact Us.

Attribution

Where use is permitted, please attribute as:

Abantu Archives (abantuarchives.com)

Questions

This policy may be updated as the project and its licensing needs evolve. For anything not covered here, or to discuss a specific use case, contact us directly.

This policy describes Abantu Archives’ own terms of use for its catalogue metadata and original content. It is not a legal opinion on the copyright status of any individual historical item in the collection.