Legibility

Every record eventually meets a reader who was never in the room: the operator who inherits a desk, the touring crew in an unfamiliar venue, the archivist at ingest, the researcher decades on. Legibility is the discipline of preparing for that reader now — and it is a property of structures, not of good intentions. A record explains itself, or it does not.

Legibility is produced by specific choices: self-describing structures, whose organization can be inferred from the object itself; documented conventions, so that names, numbers, and statuses can be decoded; open, durable formats that do not hold content hostage to a vendor’s lifespan; and explicit attribution, so that authorship and provenance survive alongside content. It is defeated by their opposites — private shorthand, undocumented schemes, closed formats, and any arrangement that works only while a particular person remains reachable. Formats age at different speeds and conventions are forgotten in a staff change; the only durable carrier of meaning is structure that explains itself.

The standard is deliberately severe: anything that depends on its maker’s availability to explain itself is unfinished. Legibility is the quality that distinguishes useful work from merely finished work — the difference between an archive and a well-organized mystery.