Endangered heritage and the capture-priority list

Some heritage can be lost before it is ever captured - to conflict, to a changing climate, to the slow decay of fragile materials, to lost funding, to displacement, or simply because no durable digital copy was ever made. The endangered-heritage register lets you flag the records most at risk and work through them in priority order, so the most vulnerable heritage is captured first. This is part of the North Star "race against loss".

What a flag is - and is not

An at-risk flag records that a curator judges an item should be captured sooner rather than later, and the documented reason why. It is not a prediction that the item will be lost, not a statement about any institution's stewardship, and not advice. Risk to heritage, and the order in which to act, are matters for qualified staff to assess against the evidence in every case. The framing is deliberately factual and non-alarmist throughout.

Flagging a record (admin)

1. Go to Capture-priority worklist (/endangered/priority).
2. Select Flag a record. To start from a record you are viewing, open the form with ?item=<information-object-id> - the record reference and any existing flag are prefilled, so re-flagging the same item amends it rather than creating a duplicate.
3. Choose a risk category, an urgency, and a capture status, and add a factual reason.
4. Save. Each item carries a single flag; flagging it again updates that flag.

Risk categories

All risk categories are managed values (the Dropdown Manager can extend them):

• Conflict or unrest - armed conflict, civil unrest or instability threatens the item or its holding site.
• Climate or environment - flood, fire, drought, sea-level rise or other environmental pressure.
• Material decay - fragile media, obsolete formats, mould, corrosion or embrittlement.
• Funding or stewardship risk - loss of funding or custodial capacity.
• Displacement - the item or community of origin is displaced.
• Digitisation gap - no durable digital surrogate exists yet, so the only record is the vulnerable original.
• Other risk - another documented risk that warrants prioritised capture.

Urgency and the priority score

Urgency bands are Critical, High, Medium and Low. The worklist orders items by a simple, legible priority score:

• the urgency band's base weight (critical highest), plus
• a small bonus when the risk is a digitisation gap (no durable surrogate yet), which is the case the race against loss most wants surfaced.

Captured and unflagged items drop out of the worklist - the race is won (or set aside) for them. Within an urgency band, the longest-waiting flag sorts first.

Capture statuses

Capture status describes where the capture effort stands:

• Unflagged - no longer treated as at-risk for capture purposes.
• Flagged - identified as at-risk and awaiting capture.
• Capture in progress - digitisation or capture work is under way.
• Captured - a durable digital surrogate has been produced.

You can advance the capture status straight from the worklist using the dropdown on each row.

The public at-risk register

The public register lives at /at-risk. It shows published items only that are still awaiting capture, ordered most-urgent first, and frames why heritage is endangered and the race to capture it. Captured items and unpublished records never appear publicly. Browse by risk category using the chips at the top.

Notes

• Everything is read-only over the existing catalogue. The only data written is the at-risk flag itself, in its own table.
• Every screen has an empty-state and never errors when nothing is flagged.