{"schema_version":1,"assessment_id":"eoa_inverse_innovation_exp03_opportunity320_20260801","source_experiment_id":"eoa_inverse_innovation_exp03_full320_20260801","cell_id":"layer_decay_and_expiration_management__archaeology_paleontology","archetype_slug":"layer_decay_and_expiration_management","domain_slug":"archaeology_paleontology","title":"Obligation-Gated Tiering for Legacy Excavation Collections","opportunity_summary":"A holding institution would inventory and revalidate legacy collection lots, trigger review from metadata, condition, access, or capacity signals, block action where authority or dependencies are unresolved, and use reversible tiering and lossless consolidation before considering any exceptional deaccession. The proposal could reduce active-storage and retrieval burdens while protecting unique evidence, but problem prevalence, incremental effectiveness, and distinctiveness from established repository practice are unverified.","adopter_authorizer":"The holding institution's authorized collections body, subject to permits, law, agreements, professional duties, and required consultation with originating, descendant, and Indigenous communities.","scores":{"meaningful_impact":{"score":4,"rationale":"If the stated backlog exists, improving retrieval, metadata integrity, and finite stewardship capacity while avoiding irreversible evidentiary loss would materially advance the affected objective. The packet does not establish how prevalent or severe the backlog is."},"stakeholder_pull":{"score":3,"rationale":"Curators, institutions, researchers, agencies, and communities have proposal-specific interests in access, care, obligations, and preservation, but the packet contains no expressed demand, willingness to participate, or evidence that they prioritize this intervention."},"incremental_advantage":{"score":3,"rationale":"Compared with uniform retention plus catalog digitization, obligation-gated review and reversible tiering plausibly address active-store burden and lifecycle ambiguity. No comparative evidence shows meaningful gains in space, retrieval, or catalog accuracy, and tiering could worsen access."},"distinctiveness_plausibility":{"score":2,"rationale":"The combination is coherently specified, but prior-art status is explicitly unsearched and the packet identifies novelty relative to established lifecycle and deaccession practice as its weakest dimension. Distinctiveness therefore cannot be credited beyond limited plausibility."},"technical_implementability":{"score":4,"rationale":"The bounded intervention uses feasible repository activities: inventory, metadata validation, movement logging, reversible location changes, retrieval tests, and lossless consolidation. Incomplete identity and dependency data could still leave most lots untierable."},"adoption_authority_feasibility":{"score":3,"rationale":"A legitimate institutional authorizer is identified and the pilot excludes sensitive and irreversible actions. Adoption remains constrained by permits, agreements, professional duties, multiple community interests, and potentially unresolved provenance or claims."},"evidence_readiness":{"score":4,"rationale":"The packet supplies observable lot-level fields, a baseline, separate problem and intervention falsifiers, named pilot outcomes, halt conditions, and rollback. Sampling, measurement windows, acceptance thresholds, and comparison procedures still require preregistration."},"safety_net_benefit":{"score":5,"rationale":"The proposal makes reversibility central: no pilot destruction, no automatic expiry, protected-category exclusions, authority gates, movement logs, quarantine, challenge, halt conditions, and restoration of prior locations and catalog states."},"scalability":{"score":3,"rationale":"The mechanism could be repeated across lots and repositories using common inventory and catalog workflows, but labor-intensive metadata repair, collection-specific obligations, consultation, physical movement, and heterogeneous authority rules may limit transfer and throughput."}},"score_confidence":"MODERATE","costs":{"first_evidence":{"band_2026_usd":"50K_TO_250K","scope":"A bounded prior-art comparison plus preregistration and non-moving baseline audit for one closed, well-documented, non-human collection, including policy review, stratified lot sampling, metadata and location checks, retrieval tests, obligation screening, staff time measurement, and community or authority review where applicable.","confidence":"LOW","assumptions":["The collection is already bounded and physically accessible.","Existing catalog and movement records can support baseline measurement.","No specimen movement, conservation treatment, digitization program, or deaccession occurs.","Legal and consultation needs are limited but not absent.","Institutional scale and lot count are unspecified."]},"initial_deployment_startup":{"band_2026_usd":"250K_TO_1M","scope":"Institution-level design and setup after favorable evidence, including governance approval, consultation protocols, catalog fields and workflow changes, staff training, inventory planning, movement logging, rollback controls, and preparation of suitable storage tiers.","confidence":"LOW","assumptions":["Deployment begins at one medium-sized holding institution.","Existing collection-management software can be configured rather than replaced.","Major building construction and acquisition of new off-site storage are excluded.","Human remains, sacred material, type specimens, active claims, and unresolved provenance remain out of scope.","Substantial curator, registrar, legal, conservation, and community-coordination labor is required."]},"operational_launch":{"band_2026_usd":"250K_TO_1M","scope":"Controlled launch across an initial set of eligible collections, including inventory repair, obligation and dependency review, reversible relocation or consolidation, retrieval validation, objection handling, monitoring, and independent evaluation against the prior lifecycle state.","confidence":"LOW","assumptions":["Launch remains limited to eligible, non-sensitive collections.","Physical storage tiers already exist or need only modest adaptation.","No irreversible deaccession is included.","Backlog size, documentation quality, and required consultation volume are unknown.","Evaluation includes matched or staged baseline comparisons and preset stopping limits."]},"annual_recurring":{"band_2026_usd":"250K_TO_1M","scope":"Recurring review cycles, inventory and metadata revalidation, storage-tier management, retrieval testing, exception review, community and authority coordination, audit trails, condition monitoring, and governance reporting at one institution.","confidence":"LOW","assumptions":["The institution maintains multiple physical and digital collection tiers.","Recurring work is performed by collections, conservation, data, legal, and consultation personnel.","No major facility expansion is included.","Annual workload depends strongly on collection volume and documentation quality, which the packet does not specify.","Exceptional deaccession proceedings, if any, would require separate authorization and resources."]}},"research_burden":"HIGH","earliest_credible_horizon":"3_TO_12_MONTHS","pipeline_gates":{"recognizable_externally_supportable_problem":{"status":"UNCERTAIN","reason":"The candidate specifies observable backlog conditions, consequences, and an audit-based falsifier, but only states that repositories may experience the problem and provides no external or representative evidence of material prevalence or severity."},"identifiable_adopter_or_authorizer":{"status":"YES","reason":"The holding institution's authorized collections body is explicitly identified, with constraints from law, permits, agreements, professional duties, and required community consultation."},"distinct_testable_incremental_claim":{"status":"UNCERTAIN","reason":"Improvement over uniform retention can be tested through space, retrieval, catalog accuracy, effort, and objection outcomes, but distinctiveness from established repository lifecycle and deaccession practice is explicitly unsearched."},"bounded_next_evidence_step":{"status":"YES","reason":"A closed, well-documented, non-human collection supports a bounded inventory, metadata, retrieval, and obligation audit without destruction or live disposition; explicit problem and intervention falsifiers are supplied."},"no_unresolved_safety_or_authority_stop":{"status":"YES","reason":"For the authorized first step, irreversible action and sensitive categories are excluded, institutional authority is retained, unresolved claims or dependencies trigger a halt, and prior locations and catalog states can be restored."},"implementation_cost_scope_and_range":{"status":"UNCERTAIN","reason":"The activities and responsible functions are identifiable, but collection volume, metadata condition, storage configuration, software needs, consultation burden, and institutional scale are absent, making even broad implementation ranges low-confidence."}},"blocking_evidence":["No representative evidence establishes that undifferentiated retention causes a material backlog, capacity constraint, retrieval burden, or metadata problem in a target institution.","Prior art is unsearched, so the proposed combination or decision rule may already be established practice.","No comparative evidence shows that reversible tiering and lossless consolidation improve space, retrieval, or catalog accuracy over the stated baseline.","Pilot sampling strata, baseline windows, retrieval protocol, objection process, and institution-approved acceptance and stopping limits are not operationalized.","The completeness of identity, provenance, obligation, dependency, and authority data is unknown; severe gaps could prevent action on most lots.","The scale of eligible collections and the labor, storage, software, consultation, and compliance resources required are unspecified."],"next_evidence_step":"Conduct a time-bounded prior-art comparison of repository lifecycle, tiering, consolidation, and deaccession policies against the proposal's exact mechanism package. Predefine the incremental claim as obligation-gated, reversible tiering triggered by metadata, condition, access, or capacity signals rather than age; treat the claim as falsified if established practice already prescribes the same combination and measurable causal pathway. In parallel only as document access permits, preregister a no-movement baseline audit for one closed, well-documented, non-human collection before any pilot deployment.","research_questions":["Does a stratified baseline audit of the target collection confirm material backlog, retrieval delay, metadata staleness, or capacity burden attributable to uniform lifecycle treatment?","Do established archaeological or paleontological repository policies already prescribe the same combination of obligation gates, reversible tiering, lossless consolidation, challenge, rollback, and periodic retrieval testing?","What proportion of lots have sufficiently complete identity, provenance, permit, agreement, community-claim, and research-dependency data to permit safe tier assignment?","Against an unchanged or staged baseline, does tiering produce institutionally meaningful improvements in space use, retrieval time, catalog accuracy, or staff effort?","What preset limits for retrieval delay, error, condition change, objections, and unresolved claims would the institution and affected communities accept?","Does tiering distribute access burdens unevenly across researchers, students, originating communities, descendant communities, or Indigenous communities?","Can consolidation preserve spatial, analytical, custodial, and contextual distinctions without loss?","Which governance, staffing, software, storage, consultation, and compliance resources determine implementation cost at the target institution?"] ,"recommendation":"PRIOR_ART_RESEARCH","uncertainty_constraints":["Closed-book assessment: no external evidence was used.","Problem prevalence, target-institution demand, market size, realized impact, and world novelty are unmeasured.","All cost bands are resource-equivalent planning ranges, not estimates, and are low-confidence because collection and institutional scale are unspecified.","Impact and advantage scores are conditional on the stated backlog and causal mechanism being confirmed.","No score or recommendation authorizes movement, deaccession, destruction, or action on excluded sensitive categories."],"closed_book_prior_art_boundary":"Prior-art status is UNSEARCHED. This assessment credits internal coherence and testability only; it makes no claim that obligation-gated lifecycle review, reversible storage tiering, lossless consolidation, quarantine, challenge, rollback, or their combination is novel, uncommon, or absent from current archaeological or paleontological repository practice."}