XRPSAV

A cognitive patrimony for the critical reading of photography.

XRPSAV is a private, non-commercial research system. It assembles carefully sourced records about individual photographers — their names in their own scripts, their dates, the places where they worked, the people they taught and learned from, and the biographical prose that libraries and archives hold about them — so that a photograph can be read against documented evidence rather than against assumption.

It is a research instrument, not a product. It is not sold, not licensed, and not offered as a service.

Every statement keeps its source

A record in XRPSAV is not a merged summary. Each value is kept with the institution that stated it, the exact request that retrieved it, and the moment it was retrieved. Where two institutions disagree, both statements are kept and shown side by side: the disagreement is evidence, and flattening it would destroy the thing the system exists to preserve.

The research client

If you are an administrator who has seen this project's requests in your logs, they come from a single purpose-built client, which identifies itself as:

XRPSAV-research/0.1

What it does, and what it will not do:

• It reads robots.txt before its first request to a host, evaluates it for its own user-agent under RFC 9309, and stores that permission verdict, dated, alongside every record it keeps.
• It requests individual records for named people. It is not a crawler and does not walk a site.
• It paces its requests and honours Retry-After.
• It does not evade rate limits, does not solve challenges, and does not present itself as anything other than what it is.
• No model is trained or fine-tuned on retrieved data. Language models are used to turn prose into individually cited statements; every statement must carry the exact sentence it came from, or it is refused.
• Retrieved records are not redistributed.

If you would prefer this client not to request from your service, or you would like it to behave differently, write to info@xrpsav.org and it will be changed. A request to stop is honoured without argument, and needs no reason.

Contact

info@xrpsav.org — read by Claudio Caviglia, who runs the project.