{"schema_version":1,"research_id":"eoa_inverse_innovation_exp06_external_evaluation_20260803","source_assessment_id":"bounded_rivalry_governance__religious_studies_theology:P4:v0","cell_id":"bounded_rivalry_governance__religious_studies_theology","search_queries":["site:neh.gov preservation assistance grants smaller institutions collections application criteria 2026","site:clir.org Recordings at Risk program demand applications funded preservation","reverse auction cultural heritage preservation digitization library","site:loc.gov audiovisual preservation lifecycle cost digital preservation sustainability","cultural heritage collections preservation needs survey insufficient funding archives official report","site:clir.org preservation mobile digitization lab community archives consortium","site:loc.gov FADGI technical guidelines digitizing cultural heritage materials 2023","CARE Principles Indigenous Data Governance cultural heritage access official","site:acquisition.gov FAR reverse auctions 17.8 rules","site:gao.gov reverse auctions procurement competition risks report","reverse auction preservation digitization archives grant allocation","cultural heritage preservation reverse auction subsidy","site:imls.gov \"Protecting America’s Collections\" Heritage Health Information Survey 2019 findings","site:imls.gov heritage health information survey collections urgent need preservation funding percentages","site:digitizationguidelines.gov Technical Guidelines for Digitizing Cultural Heritage Materials 2023 PDF","FADGI 2023 technical guidelines cultural heritage digitization official PDF","UNESCO documentary heritage preservation insufficient funding collections risk webpage","library archives preservation backlog funding survey webpage cultural heritage","museum collections care survey preservation needs funding archives 2024 webpage","site:oclc.org archives preservation needs survey funding collections"],"sources":[{"source_id":"S1","title":"Towards Sustainable Preservation and Accessibility of Documentary Heritage","publisher":"UNESCO","url":"https://www.unesco.org/en/articles/towards-sustainable-preservation-and-accessibility-documentary-heritage","source_class":"OFFICIAL_GUIDANCE","publication_date":"2021-04-11; updated 2024-05-23","accessed_at":"2026-08-03","claims_supported":["Documentary collections face material threats and catastrophic-loss risks.","UNESCO reports that possibly up to 80% of audiovisual collections in research institutions or cultural bodies are not adequately safeguarded.","Preservation requires institutional cooperation and risk-management capacity."]},{"source_id":"S2","title":"Preserving Endangered Cultural Memory at a Time of Heightened Risk: Evaluating the Recordings at Risk Grant Program","publisher":"Council on Library and Information Resources","url":"https://www.clir.org/pubs/reports/preserving-endangered-cultural-memory-at-a-time-of-heightened-risk/","source_class":"PRIMARY_RESEARCH","publication_date":"2026-04","accessed_at":"2026-08-03","claims_supported":["A two-year evaluation surveyed and interviewed preservation-program participants and stakeholders.","CLIR had awarded more than $6 million for fragile and obsolete audiovisual collections since 2017.","The evaluation was intended to inform program redesign and better serve under-resourced collecting organizations."]},{"source_id":"S3","title":"Recordings at Risk","publisher":"Council on Library and Information Resources","url":"https://www.clir.org/recordings-at-risk/","source_class":"OFFICIAL_ORGANIZATION_DATA","publication_date":"current 2025-2026 competition page","accessed_at":"2026-08-03","claims_supported":["An identifiable funder runs recurring expert-reviewed competitions for preservation reformatting.","The program will distribute $8.75 million across fourteen competitions from 2017 through 2026.","Awards are $10,000-$60,000 and target organizations constrained by resources or technical expertise.","Current assessment criteria are impact, urgency, preservation potential, and legal and ethical access—not reverse-bid price discovery."]},{"source_id":"S4","title":"Collections Stewardship","publisher":"National Endowment for the Humanities","url":"https://www.neh.gov/program/collections-stewardship","source_class":"GOVERNMENT_OR_REGULATOR","publication_date":"2026","accessed_at":"2026-08-03","claims_supported":["NEH is an identifiable authorizer and funder of preservation, conservation, description, digitization, storage, and training projects.","The 2026 program accepts applications from libraries, archives, museums, universities, service organizations, and consortia.","Maximum awards are $350,000 for one organization and $500,000 for a consortium."]},{"source_id":"S5","title":"Preservation and Selection for Digitization","publisher":"Northeast Document Conservation Center","url":"https://www.nedcc.org/free-resources/preservation-leaflets/6.-reformatting/6.6-preservation-and-selection-for-digitization%26lang%3Den","source_class":"OFFICIAL_GUIDANCE","publication_date":"n.d.","accessed_at":"2026-08-03","claims_supported":["No absolute selection criterion fits all collections; selection requires local interpretation of value, physical condition, rights, infrastructure, and audience needs.","Copyright, privacy, religious, ethnic, and community sensitivities may limit digitization or access.","Lifecycle work includes preparation, conservation, capture, metadata, access systems, and long-term file management.","Subject, preservation, imaging, metadata, and digital-asset experts must collaborate."]},{"source_id":"S6","title":"Technical Guidelines for Digitizing Cultural Heritage Materials","publisher":"Federal Agencies Digital Guidelines Initiative","url":"https://www.digitizationguidelines.gov/guidelines/digitize-technical.html","source_class":"STANDARD","publication_date":"2023; page updated 2024-02-27","accessed_at":"2026-08-03","claims_supported":["Shared technical best practices and conformance-testing methods exist for digitizing textual, map, photographic, and other still-image cultural heritage materials.","A technically standardized quality floor is implementable for bounded material categories.","Conformance requires testing, monitoring, appropriate targets, software, and skilled practice."]},{"source_id":"S7","title":"The CARE Principles for Indigenous Data Governance","publisher":"Global Indigenous Data Alliance","url":"https://www.gida-global.org/careprinciples","source_class":"OFFICIAL_GUIDANCE","publication_date":"2019","accessed_at":"2026-08-03","claims_supported":["Open-data and interoperability goals can conflict with Indigenous rights, interests, historical context, and authority.","Governance should preserve collective benefit, authority to control, responsibility, ethics, self-determination, and community-defined purpose.","Transferability or access requirements cannot be treated as overriding cultural authority."]},{"source_id":"S8","title":"Federal Acquisition Regulation Subpart 17.8—Reverse Auctions","publisher":"Acquisition.gov / U.S. General Services Administration","url":"https://login.acquisition.gov/far/subpart-17.8","source_class":"GOVERNMENT_OR_REGULATOR","publication_date":"effective 2026-03-13","accessed_at":"2026-08-03","claims_supported":["Reverse auctions are an established procurement practice with codified procedures, confidentiality controls, conflict rules, documentation, and data-disposition requirements.","Federal policy considers them appropriate when a competitive marketplace exists, multiple offerors can satisfy the requirement, and specifications are clearly defined and relatively less complex.","Reverse auctions discover price but do not replace the underlying acquisition, responsibility, or award procedures.","Open or nonproprietary data transition and protection of bid information are operationally feasible safeguards."]}],"problem_evidence":{"support":"STRONG","rationale":"The broad preservation problem visibly exists: UNESCO reports extensive inadequate safeguarding, active CLIR and NEH programs commit substantial scarce funding, and professional guidance identifies rights, preparation, metadata, infrastructure, and long-term management as consequential cost components. Evidence does not establish the proposal's narrower allegations of custodian underbidding, coordinated cover bids, or award concentration.","source_ids":["S1","S2","S3","S4","S5"]},"stakeholder_evidence":{"support":"MODERATE","rationale":"CLIR and NEH are identifiable funders with active preservation competitions, and CLIR commissioned stakeholder research explicitly to inform redesign for under-resourced organizations. No source expresses demand for reverse auctions, externality schedules, bonds, or anti-collusion screens specifically; adopter pull for this mechanism remains unverified.","source_ids":["S2","S3","S4"]},"prior_art":{"proximity":"ADJACENT_PRIOR_ART","closest_analogues":[{"name":"CLIR Recordings at Risk expert-reviewed grant competitions","similarity":"Recurring scarce preservation funding, eligibility rules, qualified service providers, ethical-access review, and bounded awards already allocate preservation resources among collecting organizations.","remaining_difference":"CLIR uses expert criteria for impact, urgency, preservation potential, and access rather than standardized externality-adjusted reverse bids, concentration limits, secured remediation, or cross-round bid screens.","source_ids":["S2","S3"]},{"name":"NEH Collections Stewardship grants","similarity":"A government funder authorizes consortium-scale preservation, conservation, digitization, metadata, storage, and capacity-building projects.","remaining_difference":"The published program is a conventional grant process, not an auction based on minimum subsidy per verified unit or a lifecycle externality schedule.","source_ids":["S4"]},{"name":"FAR reverse-auction governance","similarity":"Established rules cover eligibility, competition, price revision, confidentiality, conflicts, documentation, provider fees, authority, and open-format data transition.","remaining_difference":"FAR warns by implication that reverse auctions fit competitive, clearly specified, less-complex purchases; heterogeneous sacred materials, urgency, cultural authority, and conservation uncertainty may defeat those conditions.","source_ids":["S8"]},{"name":"NEDCC/FADGI preservation-selection and digitization practice","similarity":"Existing practice already requires rights review, material preparation, conservation, technical standards, metadata, quality control, infrastructure, expert collaboration, and lifecycle planning.","remaining_difference":"These practices can define eligibility and cost fields but do not supply a price-clearing allocation mechanism or prove that projects can be normalized into auctionable units.","source_ids":["S5","S6"]}],"distinctive_claim_remaining":"For pre-authorized projects within genuinely comparable format-and-treatment lots, an audited externality-adjusted subsidy bid will predict realized full lifecycle cost and allocate fixed lab capacity more cost-effectively than narrative-panel, first-come, formula, or lottery allocation, without increasing cultural exclusion, material harm, change orders, technical concentration, or stranded outputs. The claim fails if lots are not reliably comparable, adjusted bids do not predict realized costs, discretionary adjustments dominate price, protected collections are systematically excluded, or safety and concentration outcomes worsen.","confidence":"MODERATE"},"implementation_evidence":{"support":"MODERATE","rationale":"Standards, expert workflows, rights screening, sealed pricing, confidentiality, data-transition rules, and defined decision authority are technically available. The central implementation dependency is unresolved: religious collections may be too heterogeneous and authority-sensitive for stable work units or fixed externality schedules. Cultural authority must remain a veto rather than a scored cost, and a live auction would require institution-specific legal, procurement, grant, conservation, privacy, copyright, insurance, and community review.","source_ids":["S5","S6","S7","S8"]},"scores":{"meaningful_impact":{"score":4,"rationale":"On a five-point scale, preventing loss and improving use of scarce preservation capacity could have high durable value, although realized incremental impact is unmeasured.","source_ids":["S1","S2","S3","S4"]},"stakeholder_pull":{"score":3,"rationale":"Active funders and stakeholder-informed redesign activity demonstrate demand for preservation support, but not demand for this auction mechanism.","source_ids":["S2","S3","S4"]},"incremental_advantage":{"score":2,"rationale":"Price discovery and lifecycle-cost normalization could improve cost transparency, but expert processes already consider urgency, viability, access, rights, and technical feasibility, and no comparative outcome evidence supports superior allocation.","source_ids":["S3","S4","S5","S8"]},"distinctiveness_plausibility":{"score":3,"rationale":"The combination of reverse subsidy bidding, cultural noncontestability, lifecycle adjustment, portfolio limits, and anti-lock-in review appears contrastive to the located programs, but world novelty and broader prior art remain unmeasured.","source_ids":["S3","S4","S8"]},"technical_implementability":{"score":3,"rationale":"Auction administration and technical digitization standards are established, but comparable preservation units and auditable externality schedules are only plausible for narrow material categories.","source_ids":["S5","S6","S8"]},"adoption_authority_feasibility":{"score":2,"rationale":"Consortia and funders can control their own subsidy and lab capacity, but cannot override custodian, community, conservator, copyright, privacy, or cultural authority; no prospective adopter has approved the mechanism.","source_ids":["S3","S4","S5","S7"]},"evidence_readiness":{"score":2,"rationale":"A bounded retrospective design is specified, but decisive evidence requires authorized proprietary project records and expert reconstruction rather than further public-web research.","source_ids":["S2","S5"]},"safety_net_benefit":{"score":3,"rationale":"Explicit vetoes, independent review, transferable formats, audit, and stop-work authority could improve safeguards, but pricing and guarantee rules could also exclude small or culturally governed custodians.","source_ids":["S5","S6","S7","S8"]},"scalability":{"score":2,"rationale":"Templates could repeat within stable material categories, but local rights, cultural protocols, condition, urgency, infrastructure, and lifecycle obligations limit cross-category and cross-jurisdiction scaling.","source_ids":["S5","S6","S7"]}},"score_confidence":"MODERATE","costs":{"first_evidence":{"band_2026_usd":"10K_TO_50K","scope":"Authorized retrospective reconstruction of up to ten closed projects, including preregistration, record extraction, two independent conservation-cost reviews, reconciliation, privacy review, comparator analysis, and a go/no-go report.","confidence":"LOW","assumptions":["Existing records are sufficiently complete and accessible.","No restricted collection content is examined.","Reviewers contribute roughly 200-500 combined professional hours.","The consortium already has secure document-handling and analysis infrastructure."],"source_ids":["S2","S5"]},"initial_deployment_startup":{"band_2026_usd":"50K_TO_250K","scope":"Design and legal review of narrow lots, work units, eligibility and cultural-authority controls, externality schedule, guarantees, sealed-bid workflow, audit protocol, appeals, security, and nonbinding simulation.","confidence":"LOW","assumptions":["Existing procurement or grant software can be configured rather than built.","Only one to three material categories are included.","Community and custodian participation is compensated.","No preservation awards or mobile-lab capital are included."],"source_ids":["S5","S6","S7","S8"]},"operational_launch":{"band_2026_usd":"250K_TO_1M","scope":"One live, multi-lot annual cycle including administration, independent permissions and condition review, preservation awards, mobile-lab operations, finalist audits, pooled guarantee costs, secure data handling, appeals, and post-project review.","confidence":"LOW","assumptions":["Award scale is comparable to an NEH consortium award or several CLIR awards.","The mobile laboratory and major equipment already exist.","The cycle covers a limited regional consortium.","Catastrophic remediation is insured or separately reserved."],"source_ids":["S3","S4","S5"]},"annual_recurring":{"band_2026_usd":"250K_TO_1M","scope":"Recurring preservation subsidies and lab operations plus eligibility review, audit, secure auction administration, preservation storage and migration obligations, monitoring, appeals, and recalibration.","confidence":"LOW","assumptions":["Annual award volume remains similar to initial launch.","Digital storage and migration costs do not expand sharply.","No major equipment replacement or litigation occurs.","Community-governance review remains an operating cost rather than uncompensated labor."],"source_ids":["S3","S4","S5","S7"]}},"verified_pipeline_gates":{"externally_supported_problem":{"status":"YES","reason":"Official and first-party sources establish widespread preservation risk, scarce competitive funding, under-resourced custodians, and material lifecycle obligations.","source_ids":["S1","S2","S3","S4","S5"]},"externally_credible_adopter_or_authorizer":{"status":"YES","reason":"CLIR and NEH are active, identifiable preservation funders, and CLIR has commissioned stakeholder-informed program-redesign research; neither has endorsed this mechanism.","source_ids":["S2","S3","S4"]},"distinct_testable_incremental_claim":{"status":"YES","reason":"The proposal can be tested on prediction of realized lifecycle cost and allocation outcomes against narrative-panel, first-come, formula, and lottery comparators, with explicit comparability, exclusion, harm, change-order, and concentration falsifiers.","source_ids":["S3","S5","S8"]},"bounded_next_evidence_step":{"status":"YES","reason":"A preregistered, read-only reconstruction of no more than ten closed projects across three categories is bounded, reversible, nonbinding, comparator-based, and terminates in a go/no-go decision.","source_ids":["S2","S5"]},"no_unresolved_safety_or_authority_stop":{"status":"YES","reason":"For the retrospective step only, authorization, de-identification, no material handling, no live-award changes, cultural-authority vetoes, and a halt on disputed authority bound the risk. This gate is not verified for live deployment.","source_ids":["S5","S7"]},"credible_cost_scope_and_range":{"status":"UNCERTAIN","reason":"Program award scales bound order of magnitude, but no local labor rates, mobile-lab operating budget, record-cleaning estimate, insurance quote, storage forecast, or community-review budget was available.","source_ids":["S3","S4","S5"]}},"next_evidence_step":"With custodian and records-owner authorization, preregister no more than three format-and-treatment categories, lifecycle fields, alternative explanations, comparability thresholds, missing-data rules, and harm/exclusion outcomes. Two independent conservation-cost reviewers should reconstruct proposed and realized costs for at most ten closed projects using de-identified administrative records. Test out-of-sample whether an externality-adjusted bid ordering is calculable and predicts realized cost better than requested budget and the actual narrative ranking; compare allocation under narrative-panel, first-come, collection-size formula, and eligibility lottery rules. Falsify advancement if reviewer agreement is poor, more than 25% of projects are incomparable, adjusted ordering is dominated by discretionary adjustments, prediction does not improve materially, protected or under-resourced custodians are disproportionately excluded, or simulated concentration and safety outcomes worsen. The only permissible output is a go/no-go decision for a nonbinding sealed-bid simulation.","blocking_evidence":["No public evidence shows that requested lab weeks exceed a particular consortium's capacity or that custodians strategically understate costs.","Requested-versus-realized lifecycle costs, change orders, metadata completion, storage performance, and remediation records are proprietary or institution-specific.","No evidence establishes that religious manuscripts, recordings, ritual objects, and community archives can be normalized into stable auction lots without erasing urgency, uniqueness, or cultural requirements.","No prospective consortium, custodian body, community authority, conservator, insurer, or legal office has approved a simulation or live auction.","No located evidence demonstrates cover bidding, bid rotation, sabotage, or provider lock-in in preservation-grant allocation.","Cost bands lack local wage, insurance, storage, platform, legal-review, consultation, and mobile-lab operating quotes.","The legal characterization of a reverse subsidy process—as grantmaking, procurement, or another allocation form—remains jurisdiction-specific."],"research_disposition":"PARTNERED_RESEARCH_PROGRAM","world_novelty_boundary":"The search located established preservation grant competitions, cultural and technical governance standards, and regulated reverse-auction procurement, but not this exact externality-adjusted reverse-subsidy design for religious-collection preservation. That absence is not evidence of world novelty. Patentability, freedom to operate, comprehensive prior art, market size, and realized impact were not assessed.","arm":"COMPLETE_PROPOSAL_PORTFOLIO","candidate_version":0,"controller_recommendation":{"action":"STOP_EMPIRICAL_RESEARCH_NEEDED","repairable":false,"material_progress_observed":true,"progress_targets":["Obtain written authorization from a consortium, records owners, and applicable custodian or community authorities for the bounded retrospective study.","Secure de-identified proposed-and-realized lifecycle records for up to ten closed projects.","Preregister comparable-unit definitions, externality fields, missing-data rules, comparator allocations, and falsification thresholds.","Measure inter-reviewer agreement and the share of projects that remain genuinely comparable.","Estimate predictive accuracy, change-order risk, exclusion, concentration, and safety outcomes against narrative, first-come, formula, and lottery comparators.","Produce institution-specific legal, cultural-governance, insurance, storage, labor, and mobile-lab cost estimates before any live simulation."],"reason":"Bounded web research verifies the general preservation problem, credible funders, adjacent prior art, technical standards, and a distinct testable claim. It cannot resolve the core causal question because that requires authorized proprietary project records and expert retrospective testing. Under the controller rule, evidence requiring fieldwork, proprietary data, or live testing requires an empirical-research stop."},"proposal_index":4}