ADR 0007: The project is named Scrinalia¶

Status: Accepted
Date: 2026-10-07
Applies to: the commit refactor(pkg)!: rename memoria_curitibana to scrinalia, which landed immediately before this record.

Context¶

Phase 5 of TODO.md listed the name among the 1.0 blockers, and the reasoning was the same as for the license: the name is the identity of the release, and renaming after 1.0 means 1.0 ships with a name that is about to be discarded, breaking every link, bookmark and document twice.

The name in use, memoria_curitibana (plus an -etl suffix in [project].name), had three separate defects:

It named one city. The stated goal is an institution-agnostic system that another archive can install; a name with Curitibana in it contradicts the product it is trying to be.
-etl named a piece of infrastructure. It describes a mechanism, not the thing itself, and it dates.
"Memory" does not say "archive". The domain is archival description, and the word that carries that meaning was available to be used.

The requirements for the replacement were: international and pronounceable in Portuguese and English; rooted in the domain, not in a technological fashion (no AI, GPT or ETL); not tied to an institution or to a standard (ISAD(G) may not be the last one); spellable from hearing; short enough for an import identifier; and free in the namespaces that matter.

The method matters as much as the outcome, because the first pass was wrong. An initial availability check looked only at PyPI and npm and concluded that Tabularium had "two hobby projects" against it. A deeper pass — package registries, container registries, DNS, and then registered trademarks and live commercial products — disqualified it outright. The lesson is recorded here so the next naming exercise does not repeat it: a name is not available just because it is free in the package index you happened to check, and the collision that matters is usually not in a package index at all.

Decision¶

The project is Scrinalia.

Python distribution and import: scrinalia. Repository: scrinalia. Display name: Scrinalia.
No alias is kept for the old import path. A compatibility shim would keep the discarded name alive in every traceback, and the project is installed rather than depended upon, so the cost falls on forks rather than on library consumers.
The rename does not touch data identity. The database name memoriacuritibana, the legacy database memoriacuritibana_legacy, the MinIO bucket memoria-curitibana-bronze and every archive_* / domain_* schema object keep their names. Those are what a running installation's data is found by; renaming them would point a working deployment at empty data for a purely cosmetic gain. This is the same distinction the license decision drew between the project and what it holds.

The name¶

scrinium is Latin, and it meant the round case that held scrolls and papers. By extension it named the record offices of the later Roman and Byzantine administration — scrinium memoriae, scrinium epistularum, scrinium libellorum, scrinium dispositionum — a usage the papal curia also kept, and one documented in reference works (the Italian encyclopaedias carry an entry for the scriniari, the officials who served in one). A scriniarius was therefore an archivist or registrar: the person responsible for the contents of the archive, not merely its building.

The ending is -alia, the Latin neuter plural of adjectives in -alis, which survives in exactly this sense in the languages this project is written for: marginalia (the things in the margin), memorabilia (the things worth remembering), naturalia, mirabilia, curiosa. It is the pattern a collection of things is named with — and memory institutions already use it as institutional vocabulary.

So the name reads structurally as "the things of the archive", which is a description of what the system holds: a body of descriptions, kept together and made findable in a plural collective rather than a singular building.

Two honest notes about the word:

scrinalia is coined, not attested Latin. The root and the ending are both real and the formation is regular, but no dictionary contains the compound. This is deliberate and it is the entire point: the meaning comes from the root and the grammar, while the collision surface comes from the form — and the form is empty.
Portuguese keeps the root. escrínio, a cabinet for papers, descends from scrinium. So the name is not alien to the Brazilian archivist even though it is not part of the language. (Its neighbour escrivão comes from a sibling root, scribanus, off scribere — not this one.)

Rationale¶

Every real archival word tested was already claimed. Measured (2026-10-07) across PyPI, npm, crates.io, Docker Hub, the six relevant TLDs, the GitHub namespace and a trademark search:

Candidate	What was found
`Tabularium`	A records-management system of the MPDFT, in production since 2016, formalised by portarias and reported on at five years; also an active crates.io crate, six Docker Hub repositories including an org with `tabularium-api` + `tabularium-web`, a GitHub user since 2014, and every domain taken including `.com.br`
`Cimelia`	A live registered trademark (EUIPO 017967984, plus its UK equivalent) held by an insurer; also a recycling company; `.com` and `.app` taken
`Repertorium`	A live AI company at `repertorium.com/.org/.eu`
`Arkheion`	A Brazilian `arkheion_backend` + `arkheion_frontend` pair on Docker Hub; and the `kh`/`ch` spelling is ambiguous
`Arkheum`	Four plausible spellings (`arkeum`, `arkheum`, `archeum`, `arqueum` — and Portuguese actively pushes toward the `qu` one, as in arquivo), `.com` and `.org` taken, on a root that also carries a software company and a geological eon
`Chartularius`	Free everywhere, but the twin spelling Cartularius is a live document-management product that has already claimed the same "document guardianship" framing
`Chartalia`	A US limited liability company
`Pinakora`, `Tabuleum`	Free, but without `.com`

The outcome is not that a better real word was found — it is that for this project the class of available real words is empty, and coining is what removes the constraint rather than working around it. - scrinalia is free on everything measured. PyPI, npm, crates.io, NuGet, RubyGems, Packagist, the Go module proxy, Docker Hub (zero hits), the GitHub username, and all six domains — .com, .org, .io, .dev, .app and .com.br. A web search returns nothing at all. - One spelling. This was the deciding argument in the final comparison, and it is a practical one rather than an aesthetic one: a name must be typed. It appears in pip install, in a repository URL, in a domain, and — under the additional term of ADR 0006 — in the footer attribution that every fork is obliged to preserve. A name that cannot be spelled from hearing gets misspelled in the one place the license forces it to be copied. scrinalia has exactly one spelling; the rejected arkheum had four. - The root is about archives, not about origins in general. arkhē is a fine root, but it reaches archives through origin, and it carries geology, philosophy and a software company along with it. scrinium reaches them directly: it is the word for the container and the office that held the records.

Consequences¶

Positive: the name no longer ties the system to a city, to a standard or to a technology; it is free in every namespace that matters, so a release can claim the distribution name, the domain and the username without negotiation; the etymology is checkable and specific; and because the database, the bucket and the schema were deliberately left alone, an existing installation migrates by pulling and re-syncing, with no data migration at all.

Negative, and accepted:

The import path changes with no alias, so anything importing memoria_curitibana stops working. Nothing outside this repository does, which is why the alias was not worth its lifetime cost.
The GitHub repository and the checkout directory still carry the old name. The footer's sourceUrl points at https://github.com/CassioDalla/Scrinalia, which is the §13 offer of Corresponding Source and must resolve — so renaming the repository is not optional politeness, it is part of the same operation, and until it happens that link is a 404. Resolved: the repository is now Scrinalia, the canonical capitalisation, matching the display name; GitHub redirects the old lowercase URL, so nothing that already cited it broke. The local directory additionally feeds the editable install's .pth, so uv sync is needed after renaming it.
The container and image names changed (scrinalia_db, scrinalia-postgres:15), which requires recreating the containers. The volume is untouched: docker compose down then up, and never down -v, which would delete the collection.
scrinalia is a coined word, so it has to be taught. There is no prior meaning to borrow for recognition, which is exactly why this ADR carries the etymology: the name's meaning now lives in the documentation because it lives nowhere else.
Git's rename detection missed one file in the rename commit (a small __init__.py whose content changed past the similarity threshold), so git show --stat reports one deletion rather than 173 renames. File counts and a symmetric diff of the package were used to verify that nothing was lost.

Alternatives considered¶

Keeping memoria_curitibana. Free, and zero work. Rejected: it fails the stated goal outright, and the cost of fixing it only grows.
Tabularium — the initial recommendation, and the one that shows why the method in Context matters. Rejected: a Brazilian public-sector records system of the same sector has used the name since 2016. Adopting it would make this project look like a copy of a government system, or the reverse.
Cimelia — short, and instantly legible to a Portuguese speaker through cimélio. Rejected on the one class of collision that can actually stop a project later: a third party holds live registered trademark rights in the name.
Repertorium — conceptually the tightest of the real words, since a Repertorium is the finding aid that archival work produces. Rejected for a live company of the same name.
Arkheion and Arkheum — the most evocative roots, and the closest calls. Rejected on the spelling argument above, and because the root is crowded.
Chartularius — free everywhere and etymologically perfect (it means archivist). Rejected because its twin spelling is a live commercial document-management product that already occupies the same "guardian of documents" meaning, which would make search and identity permanently ambiguous.
A coined compound on a different root, such as pinakora (from the Pinakes, Callimachus's catalogue at Alexandria — arguably the best story of any candidate). Rejected only because .com was taken while scrinalia took everything.

Revisit trigger¶

The name is the identity of the 1.0 release, so the trigger for changing it is not a technical event but a strategic one: if the project is ever to be presented as Software Público Brasileiro, or adopted under a public programme that requires a name with an owner, revisit this. A coined name is deliberately unowned, which is a virtue for adoption and a problem for any process that expects a trademark holder. Also revisit if a Scrinalia appears in the archival sector: the name being free is a fact about 2026-10-07, and the measurements above are dated for that reason.