About this demo

A concept demo of a searchable heritage archive for the Lynden Heritage Museum, in Lynden, Washington — ask a question about the town, the Nooksack valley, and Whatcom County and get a plain-language answer with its sources.

This demo puts a live, cited archive search in front of real public-domain and Creative-Commons heritage documents about Lynden, Ferndale, Nooksack, and Whatcom County. Every answer is drawn only from those documents and shows exactly which ones it came from.

How it works

Type a question and the demo searches a small archive of real heritage documents, finds the passages most relevant to your question, and asks a language model to answer only from those passages. Every answer is shown alongside the exact source documents it drew from, so you can click through and check it yourself.

If nothing in the archive is relevant, the demo says so — it returns an honest “not in the archive yet” rather than inventing an answer. There is zero fabricated history here: every fact comes from one of the sources below.

What it searches

The demo archive is 9 public-domain and Creative-Commons documents about Lynden, Ferndale, Nooksack, and Whatcom County:

Built by Cale Cymek as a concept demo. Not affiliated with the Lynden Heritage Museum; the official museum is at lyndenheritagemuseum.org.