{"actors":["Digital collections archivists who accession born-digital content","Repository operations staff who run ingest and preservation workflows","Collection managers who accept deposits and transfers","Records, rights, and donor-relations staff who constrain disposition or access","Depositors and originating units whose material may be deferred or returned"],"affected_objective":"Keep accessioned born-digital content awaiting preservation-readiness clearance within verified staging capacity and age limits while preserving provenance, donor terms, records obligations, and collection continuity.","arm":"COMMON_P1","authority_safety":{"authorized_first_step":"The digital preservation manager may conduct a read-only, eight-week retrospective reconciliation for one collecting unit using existing accession, storage, workflow, transfer, and withdrawal logs; the step does not change intake, priority, access, retention, or disposition.","decision_authority":"The digital preservation manager owns measurement and may recommend thresholds; the head archivist and repository operations manager must jointly authorize workflow or intake changes, with records, rights, or donor-relations approval where governing obligations apply.","excluded_actions":["Deleting, deaccessioning, or overwriting collection content","Changing donor agreements, retention duties, access restrictions, or records classifications","Deferring legally mandated transfers without the responsible records authority","Treating missing measurements as evidence that content has left the stock","Moving content to unmonitored storage merely to lower the measured stock","Automatically rejecting deposits or reprioritizing collections without authorized human review"],"halt_rollback":"Suspend any later control change if reconciliation residuals exceed the predeclared tolerance, material is displaced outside the measured boundary, preservation checks are bypassed, or rights and retention obligations are threatened. Restore the prior intake and workflow rules, retain audit logs and copies, and correct the boundary or measurements before reconsideration."},"baseline":"Compare the proposed control frame with the same collecting unit's existing practice: reporting weekly ingest and completion rates or queue age, handling overload through periodic cleanup or added storage, and lacking a reconciled level measure, capacity-derived warning threshold, and explicit accounting for withdrawals, transfers, and hidden staging locations.","candidate_id":"stock_flow_accumulation_control__library_information_science__COMMON_P1","causal_chain":["Born-digital deposits and internal transfers add terabytes to preservation staging.","Validation failures, rights questions, malware review, format characterization, and staff scheduling delay preservation-readiness clearance.","When weekly inflow exceeds completed clearance, authorized withdrawal, and monitored transfer, the uncleared stock persists and grows even if the intake rate later falls.","Rate-only reports can therefore appear improved while the accumulated level remains near staging capacity or contains increasingly old material.","A weekly stock-flow reconciliation makes the level, net change, delays, and unexplained residual visible.","Capacity- and age-based thresholds trigger authorized combinations of inflow moderation, targeted clearance, temporary staffed processing, or monitored transfer.","Repeated measurement tests whether the stock returns toward its intended band rather than merely moving into another queue or storage location."],"cell_id":"stock_flow_accumulation_control__library_information_science","consequence":"The repository can exhaust verified staging capacity, leave content longer without preservation safeguards, make emergency processing decisions with incomplete provenance or rights review, or displace uncleared material into less visible storage even after reported intake rates decline.","diversity_from_prior_proposals":"No prior proposals were inspected under runtime isolation; this candidate is internally differentiated from its named rivals by controlling the reconciled accumulated level of uncleared born-digital content rather than only throughput, queue age, storage capacity, or a one-time cleanup.","experiment_id":"eoa_inverse_innovation_exp13_second_slot_policy60_20260806","intervention":"For one collecting unit, establish a weekly ledger whose stock is terabytes of accessioned born-digital content inside designated repository-controlled staging locations that have not passed the minimum preservation-readiness gate. Reconcile observed stock change with deposited and transferred-in terabytes minus cleared-to-preservation, authorized-withdrawal, and monitored-transfer-out terabytes; investigate residuals across local drives, cloud staging, quarantine, and vendor custody. Define a target band bounded above by verified replicated-staging capacity minus an operational safety reserve, with a separate maximum-age warning. Preauthorize threshold-specific recommendations—deposit scheduling, focused clearance work, approved temporary capacity, or monitored transfer—and review weekly until both stock and turnover remain in band, then relax or retune the controls.","mechanism_mapping":[{"counterfactual_removal":"Without reconciliation, reported inflow and completion rates could improve while the inherited stock or an accounting residual remains unexplained.","mechanism_slug":"stock_flow_balance_reconciliation","role":"Relates the weekly change in uncleared terabytes to measured inflow, clearance, withdrawal, and transfer flows using consistent units and boundaries."},{"counterfactual_removal":"Without this mechanism, the ledger would describe accumulation but would not connect threshold crossings to actions capable of changing long-run net flow.","mechanism_slug":"net_flow_lever_adjustment","role":"Links threshold crossings to authorized changes in deposit timing, clearance effort, monitored transfer, or verified capacity."},{"counterfactual_removal":"Without a level and age alert, staff could continue reacting to anecdotes or current rates only after staging capacity or preservation-time constraints are crossed.","mechanism_slug":"accumulation_threshold_alert","role":"Signals when total uncleared terabytes or the oldest uncleared accession approaches a predeclared operating boundary."},{"counterfactual_removal":"Without a hidden-stock probe, content moved to quarantine, staff drives, vendor custody, or an untracked cloud location could falsely appear cleared.","mechanism_slug":"hidden_accumulation_probe","role":"Investigates reconciliation residuals and coupled storage locations for displacement outside the nominal staging queue."},{"counterfactual_removal":"Without lag-aware review, managers could reverse a control before scheduled deposits, batch validation, or transfer latency appears in the stock trajectory.","mechanism_slug":"delay_compensated_control","role":"Records expected delays between authorization, workflow execution, and measurable stock change before controls are retuned."}],"nearest_rivals":["A queue dashboard that reports accession age, item count, and completions but does not reconcile the accumulated terabyte level to net flows","Service-level triage that prioritizes the oldest or most valuable accessions without governing total staging stock","A one-time metadata or preservation-processing campaign that drains existing work without correcting a continuing flow imbalance","Storage expansion that raises immediate capacity without thresholds, turnover rules, or checks for induced intake and downstream displacement","Deposit scheduling used solely as upstream backpressure without measuring whether the inherited stock actually declines"],"negative_tests":{"intervention_falsifier":"After accounting for scheduled lags, the intervention is falsified if ledger-triggered, actually executed levers do not produce the predicted direction of net-flow or stock change across the pilot window, or if equivalent decisions occur from the baseline dashboard with no additional decision-relevant information from stock reconciliation.","problem_falsifier":"The proposed problem is absent if records show no persistent uncleared carryover between review periods, or if the repository already measures a stable bounded stock, reconciles it to all material flows with small residuals, and uses those results in authorized threshold decisions.","risks":["Object counts or nominal terabytes may obscure processing complexity, compression, duplication, or preservation risk differences.","Boundary errors may classify hidden displacement as successful clearance.","Intake moderation may disadvantage small, time-sensitive, or less powerful depositors.","Focusing clearance work on easy high-volume material may leave complex or culturally sensitive accessions older.","Temporary capacity expansion may invite additional intake and recreate pressure.","Aggressive clearance targets may encourage skipped validation, provenance, rights, security, or accessibility checks.","Threshold responses may conflict with donor agreements, retention schedules, or mandatory-transfer duties."],"strongest_counterevidence":"A complete historical record showing that the existing age-and-throughput workflow already anticipates every capacity or preservation-age threshold crossing, keeps all staging locations visible, and selects the same safe actions would undermine the claim that an explicit stock-flow control frame adds decision value."},"next_evidence_step":"Using existing logs only, reconstruct eight consecutive weekly snapshots for one collecting unit: starting and ending uncleared terabytes; deposits and transfers in; preservation clearances, authorized withdrawals, and monitored transfers out; oldest-accession age; and storage location. Predeclare a reconciliation tolerance based on measurement precision, calculate each week's residual, inspect only the largest residuals, and compare whether stock-level warnings would have changed any documented decision relative to the baseline. End with a go/no-go review; do not activate operational controls during this step.","observable_state":"A weekly, auditable table shows the current uncleared stock in terabytes, its oldest-accession age, verified staging capacity and safety reserve, deposits and transfers in per week, preservation clearances, authorized withdrawals and monitored transfers out per week, predicted versus observed stock change, reconciliation residual, material by staging location, threshold status, authorized action, expected lag, and subsequent trajectory.","prior_art_status":"UNSEARCHED","problem":"A digital repository may track how many born-digital deposits arrive or complete each week without governing the persistent stock of accessioned content that has not passed preservation-readiness checks. Because deposits, validation clearance, withdrawals, transfers, quarantine, and off-system staging are not reconciled against the accumulated level, the repository can approach verified staging capacity or retain aging, uncleared content even when the current intake rate appears manageable.","proposal_index":1,"remaining_contrastive_claim":"The claim left for testing is that, for the same accession workflow, a boundary-stable reconciliation of uncleared terabytes plus capacity and age thresholds identifies materially different or earlier authorized control decisions than queue age, throughput reporting, one-time cleanup, or capacity expansion alone.","revision_record":{"claim_changes":["Initial version; the contrastive claim is framed as a testable proposition and makes no assertion of novelty, prevalence, demand, or effect size."],"conceptual_changes":["Initial version; defines a persistent preservation-staging stock separately from weekly ingest and clearance flows.","Initial version; includes coupled hidden storage locations and operational delays in the control boundary."],"evidence_changes":["Initial version; prior art remains unsearched and the first evidence step is limited to a retrospective single-unit reconciliation."],"operational_changes":["Initial version; no operational intake or workflow control is authorized before the read-only reconciliation and joint review."],"parent_version":null,"progress_targets_addressed":["Concrete actors, stock, unit, boundary, owner, measurement source, and cadence","Explicit inflow, outflow, clearance, withdrawal, transfer, leakage, and delay paths","Target, warning, capacity, and age constraints","Authority limits, safeguards, falsifiers, risks, and rollback conditions","Bounded first evidence step"]},"schema_version":1,"structural_mapping":[{"archetype_element":"Accumulated stock","domain_realization":"Terabytes of accessioned born-digital content in designated repository-controlled staging locations that have not passed the minimum preservation-readiness gate."},{"archetype_element":"Stock boundary, owner, unit, source, and cadence","domain_realization":"The digital preservation manager owns a weekly terabyte ledger derived from accession records, storage inventories, workflow events, quarantine logs, and documented external custody for one collecting unit."},{"archetype_element":"Inflow","domain_realization":"New deposits, accession transfers, restored packages, and material returned from external processing enter the uncleared stock in terabytes per week."},{"archetype_element":"Outflow and clearance","domain_realization":"Content leaves the stock when it passes the defined preservation-readiness gate and enters managed preservation storage."},{"archetype_element":"Leakage, conversion, and transfer paths","domain_realization":"Authorized withdrawals and monitored external transfers reduce the bounded stock; copies on staff drives, unregistered cloud staging, quarantine, or undocumented vendor custody create residuals or hidden coupled stocks; repackaging and deduplication require recorded measurement conversions."},{"archetype_element":"Net-flow balance","domain_realization":"Ending uncleared terabytes equal starting uncleared terabytes plus deposits and transfers in minus preservation clearances, authorized withdrawals, and monitored transfers out, subject to recorded measurement conversions and an explicit residual."},{"archetype_element":"Target band and thresholds","domain_realization":"The upper operating bound is tied to verified replicated-staging capacity minus a safety reserve, while an accession-age ceiling provides a distinct warning against acceptable total volume masking stale content."},{"archetype_element":"Control levers","domain_realization":"Authorized levers include scheduling discretionary deposits, focusing clearance work, adding time-limited staffed processing, provisioning approved temporary verified capacity, and transferring custody through a monitored arrangement."},{"archetype_element":"Delays and feedback","domain_realization":"Scheduled deposits, batch validation, rights review, procurement, and external transfer latency are registered so weekly controls are not reversed before their expected effects become observable."},{"archetype_element":"Hidden-reservoir and displacement check","domain_realization":"Reconciliation residuals trigger inspection of quarantine, local drives, cloud staging, vendor custody, and downstream preservation exceptions before a stock reduction is accepted as genuine."}],"title":"Preservation-Staging Stock Control for Born-Digital Accessions","version":0}