Your Community's Stories, Searchable Forever
Cultural moments disappear when the funding cycle ends. We turn them into living archives: connected, searchable, and built to grow with the communities they belong to.
What did the textile mill smell like in 1960?
“She remembers hot oil and damp wool — and the street filling up every Tuesday morning...”
— Mrs Patel, Oral History #42 · 1962
3 connected records · 2 related oral histories · 1 photo archive
The Problem
The culture is alive. The record isn't.
Brilliant community work (oral histories, textile archives, neighbourhood stories) lives on Instagram stories, short-lived websites, and scattered hard drives. When the funding cycle ends, the record evaporates.
We build living archives: ecosystems where stories stay connected, stay findable, and keep growing.
- Turn messy audio, text, and images into structured, searchable data.
- Ask questions and get answers, with citations back to the source.
- Communities own and control their data. Exportable, GDPR-compliant, no lock-in.
“The street filling up every Tuesday morning... that's what I want my grandchildren to know.”— From a Threads of Memory oral history, Haringey, London
Nothing exists in isolation
Stories feed communities. Communities generate insights. Insights shape new archives. That's not a metaphor: it's how a living archive actually works.
Stories
Oral histories, interviews, and first-hand accounts
Communities
The people who lived it, and those who want to learn
Living Archive
The connected, searchable heart of it all
Archives
Photos, documents, artefacts: structured and linked
Insights
Patterns, connections, and discoveries that emerge
What we're building
Archive infrastructure that works like an ecosystem, not a filing cabinet.
Structured ingestion
Interviews, scans, and photos become structured, searchable data with provenance, rather than just a folder of files nobody can find.
Conversational search
Ask a question in plain language, get an answer grounded in the source material, with citations. Not a list of results: an actual answer.
Open and exportable
Open formats, portable data, no lock-in. Your archive belongs to your community, full stop.
Privacy by default
Permissioning, redaction workflows, and guardrails baked in from day one. Because some stories aren't for everyone.
The ecosystem in action
One oral history. Watch it become a living, connected piece of cultural infrastructure.
A story is recorded
Mrs Patel sits down with a community researcher in Haringey and shares her memories of working at the textile mill.
The archive absorbs it
Audio is transcribed, tagged, and linked to related records: other interviews, photographs, maps of the area.
Connections emerge
A school in Tottenham searches the archive for local industry history. Mrs Patel's interview surfaces alongside factory photographs from the 1960s.
The ecosystem grows
The school contributes their own student interviews. New connections form. The archive gets richer. The community gets stronger.
Come build with us
We're building with cultural workers, creators, and institutions who believe community stories deserve better infrastructure. Get early access or partner on a pilot.