Mission
The SIJILL Corpus preserves historical records of land ownership, property, and civil administration, with particular attention to the period from 1945 to 1950. Its purpose is documentary and scholarly: to safeguard fragile records against loss, to make them citable and verifiable for researchers, and to support the historical study of property and administration. The initiative is non-commercial and independent.
Scope
The collection focuses on land title and property registers, cadastral material, and administrative and military-government records of the period, assembled from publicly available archival catalogues and released holdings. Materials are described with their originating catalogue references so that each item can be traced back to its source.
Provenance and chain of custody
Integrity is treated as a first-order requirement. Every item is retained as its original artifact, and at the moment of ingestion a SHA-256 cryptographic hash is computed and recorded. No ledger entry is created unless the artifact physically exists and its hash has been verified, so the catalogue cannot describe a document that is not actually held. Source references and acquisition dates are preserved alongside each record, and the ledger is version-controlled so that any change is attributable and reversible.
Standards and ethics
- Non-commercial and open to scholarly and educational use.
- Fidelity to archival provenance; records are presented as found, without alteration.
- Respect for the rights of originating archives and rights holders; good-faith handling of copyright and takedown requests.
- Corrections, additional provenance, and source contributions are welcomed.
Contact
Correspondence, including from archives and institutions, may be directed to [email protected].