Monthly briefing
March 2026
1–31 March 2026 published 31 March 2026
March is the month the editorial contract gets written down. The four-source floor, the per-tier image policy, and the ColBase verbatim attribution decision are committed to the project's public operating manual. Foundations before publication.
March is preparation. The corpus does not begin shipping articles until April; this briefing records the editorial commitments that govern everything that follows. The four pillars: every article carries four sources of distinct kinds; every image traces to its file page; ColBase attribution is preserved verbatim in Japanese; no single institution provides more than 35 percent of heroes. The standards are public, not for posture but because reading the operating manual is the first source check a reader can run on the site.
5 items
The four-source floor is committed
The editorial floor: every article carries a Tier-1 or Tier-2 museum accession, a named-scholar passage with a page reference, a primary-text citation, and a cross-institutional reference. 'See Bogel (2009)' is not a citation. The floor is a fixed standard, enforced at publication, not left to discretion.
ColBase verbatim attribution is the policy
ColBase grants free use for commercial and non-commercial purposes provided the source is clearly indicated. The required attribution is in Japanese — 出典：ColBase（https://colbase.nich.go.jp/） — and bodhi surfaces the verbatim line in the figure caption, not buried in metadata. The decision is the first irrevocable commitment: a Japanese cultural-heritage source is named the way it asks to be named.
Tier 1, Tier 2, Tier 3 — the image policy
Tier 1 is CC0 and equivalent public-domain dedications: the Met, Cleveland, Smithsonian, AIC, Harvard, LACMA, Rijksmuseum, Paris Musées (Cernuschi), NDL, and Wikimedia Commons PD-art. Tier 2 is open in practice with named attribution preserved: ColBase, e-Museum, NMK (KOGL), IDP. Tier 3 — the British Museum, V&A, temple collections, Palace Museum Beijing — bodhi cites but does not reproduce. The hero image of every published article is Tier 1; the corpus target is 75 percent Tier 1 across all reproduced images.
The 35-percent diversification cap
No single institution provides more than 35 percent of bodhi's image heroes. The Met and ColBase will be the largest contributors; the cap stops a hypothetical policy change at one collection from forcing widespread takedowns. Enforced against the running cleared-image manifest at publish time. The number is not a target — it is a ceiling.
The agent-os/ directory goes public
The editorial contract — voice, observation discipline, source standards, image rights, the never-do list — is maintained in the project's `agent-os/` directory and kept under version control. The reader cannot run the same pipeline the editor runs, but the reader can read the rules the editor follows. The Sources, Image rights, Licences, and Colophon pages summarize the full contract.