The past, on the evidence.

Two separate checks

• The catalogue record shows that a source exists and describes it: creator, title, date, publisher and where it is held. It is checked against the holding library's or archive's record. On its own it verifies nothing about what the source says.
• The passage is what supports a statement. A historical claim is VERIFIED only when the exact page, folio, image or chapter of a named digitised copy has been read and found to contain the passage it rests on. The location is published with the claim, so anyone can open the page and read it.

What counts as a historical source

• Printed book
• Periodical (newspaper or journal issue)
• Manuscript
• Archival document
• Printed ephemera (leaflet, poster, programme)
• Map or plan
• Literary work (novel, poem or play)

A novel, poem or play shows how a smell was written about at the time. It is not a record of events. Every claim resting on one says so.

Dates, never more precise than the catalogue

SmellBook records a date exactly as the catalogue gives it, and derives its precision from that. Nothing is rounded, completed or guessed.

For now, only sources with an exact year, month or day can be registered, because citations and exports carry plain dates. Approximate dates can still be recorded in heritage records and worksheets.

Where in the source

A passage is cited by page, folio, leaf, image of the digitised copy, column, section, entry, chapter. A printed page number is used only when the digitised copy's own page list gives it; otherwise the image number is cited. Each passage also states the time it describes:

• The passage itself states the time it describes.
• The passage states no time; the source's publication date is used as the latest possible time it describes.

The past is not the present

A historical statement about a place describes that place at that time. SmellBook links it as “historically documented at”, with its period, and never as how the place smells today. A present-day link (“documented at”) needs a scientific source.

• Church Incense, historically documented at Valencia in 1901 (CLM-INCENSE-002)

Rights

SmellBook publishes the citation, the location of the passage and its own wording. It reproduces no passage from any source. To check a passage, SmellBook keeps the page text internally, so only texts whose rights allow that are registered:

• The text is in the public domain (basis recorded). Can be registered.
• The text is published under an open licence (named in the basis). Can be registered.
• The text may still be protected by copyright. Not registered.
• The rights status of the text has not been established. Not registered.

Digitised copies are read in open collections: Wikisource, Internet Archive, Gallica (Bibliothèque nationale de France).

Registered historical sources

• Quelques jours en Espagne · John Lemoinne · 1858 · p. 425 for CLM-GARLIC-002
• La barraca · Vicente Blasco Ibáñez · 1901 · ch. IV for CLM-INCENSE-002

Found, but not registered

Passages the historical source search found that SmellBook does not register, and why. Nothing is linked on weaker grounds.

• Orange blossom in and around Valencia. The chapter on Valencia in an 1863 French travel account of Spain (Le Tour du monde), and Valencian novels by Vicente Blasco Ibáñez, describe the scent of orange trees in bloom. SmellBook has no orange-blossom entry; a new entry would go through a reviewed draft batch first.
• The smoke of a falla. Blasco Ibáñez's novel Arroz y tartana describes the dense smoke of a burning falla. SmellBook has no entry for that smoke, and calling it wood smoke would add a material the passage does not name.
• Frying oil at a buñuelo stall during the Fallas. The same novel describes the sharp smell of frying oil around a buñuelo stall. SmellBook has no frying-oil entry.
• Marsh air near Valencia. The 1863 travel account describes unhealthy marsh exhalations near Valencia. It describes unhealthiness rather than a smell SmellBook has an entry for.

For archives, libraries, museums and researchers

Found a passage about a smell in a digitised historical source? Record it in the historical source worksheet: one row per passage, with the catalogue record, the digitised copy, the location and the time it describes. The registered passages are included as filled examples. Nothing is published from the worksheet; an editor checks every row. The records are also available as open data.