Methodology

This archive is built so that adding a record and publishing a record are two different, deliberately separated steps. Adding a record is easy — it's just a JSON file. Publishing is gated in code, not left to memory or good intentions.

The five review statuses

• unverified — the default for every new record. Not published, not searchable.
• uncertain — reviewed enough to publish metadata, but attribution, date, or rights are genuinely unclear. Published with a visible warning label and no locally hosted image; readers are sent to the institutional source.
• restricted — a human has decided this should not be public. Never published.
• culturally-held — a human has determined this material is culturally sensitive and should not be displayed here. Never published.
• verified-open — has passed review. May be published, and may show an image if every rights and cultural-sensitivity gate below also passes.

What makes an image eligible

A verified-open record may display its image only when all of the following are true — every one of these is a value a human explicitly set, never something the system calculates:

• culturalSensitivityStatus is cleared
• rights.shipStatus is approved
• rights.status is not unreviewed, researchOnly, metadataOnly, or excluded
• rights.permissions.displayInApp is true
• rights.permissions.commercialDistribution is true

If any one of these is missing, false, or unset, the record can still be published as metadata — it just won't show an image. Nothing here infers or calculates rights status automatically.

How the build enforces this

Every record in records/ is validated at build time. A record missing a required field, or with an invalid value for one of the fixed vocabularies (like reviewStatus), fails the build with a specific, per-record, per-field error — the site simply won't generate until it's fixed. See the project README.md for how to run validation yourself.

What "added" does not mean

Adding a JSON file to records/ does not publish it. Every new record defaults to unverified, which is excluded from the public site and search index. A human has to deliberately review it and change its status — see REVIEW-CHECKLIST.md for that process.