Heratio Help Center article. Category: Collection Mgmt / Provenance.

Preservation Timeline User Guide

Overview

The Preservation Timeline is a public, per-record page that shows, honestly and read-only, the recorded digital-preservation lifecycle of a published archival record's digital objects. For one record it lists, in chronological order, each recorded preservation step - ingest, fixity checks, format identification, migrations or normalisations, and virus scans - together with the step's recorded outcome, when it ran, and the agent or tool responsible for it.

It follows the PREMIS discipline for preservation metadata: every step in a digital object's life is recorded with its outcome, its timing, and the responsible agent. Where the Authenticity Report (/authenticity/{idOrSlug}) consolidates C2PA signing and provenance signals, and the AI Inference Provenance Explorer (/inference-provenance/{idOrSlug}) shows what AI contributed to the metadata, the Preservation Timeline answers a third, distinct question: "what has actually happened to the bits of this record over time?" Open it at /preservation-timeline/{idOrSlug} - for example https://your-site.example/preservation-timeline/1234 or https://your-site.example/preservation-timeline/fonds/series/item.

What it does

The page reads the preservation record that Heratio keeps for a record's digital objects and merges every recorded step into one chronological timeline. For each event it shows:

• Step and lifecycle stage - what happened (an ingest, a fixity check, a format identification, a migration or normalisation, a virus scan) and which lifecycle stage it belongs to.
• Outcome - the recorded result of the step: success, warning, or failure. (Where a source did not record an outcome, the event is simply marked "recorded".)
• When - the timestamp of the step.
• Responsible agent or tool - the preservation process, tool, or engine that carried out the step (for example the ingest process, a checksum algorithm, a format-identification tool, or a virus-scan engine).
• Source - which preservation log the event came from (the preservation event log, the fixity-check log, the format-identification log, the migration log, or the virus-scan log).

Above the list, at-a-glance counts show the total events, how many distinct lifecycle stages are present, and how many recorded successes and failures there are. A by-stage breakdown groups the events by lifecycle stage.

A machine-readable companion is available at /preservation-timeline/{idOrSlug}.json.

Honest framing

The Preservation Timeline is a read-only view of what was recorded. It is the recorded preservation history; it is not a verdict on whether the source itself is authentic, complete, or true. When no preservation events are on file for a record, the page says so plainly - "No preservation events recorded yet" - rather than inferring or inventing a history. Absence of an event is shown as absence.

How to use it

1. Open the timeline: go to /preservation-timeline/{idOrSlug}, replacing {idOrSlug} with the record's numeric id or its slug. Only published records have a page; an unknown or unpublished reference returns a "not found" page.
2. Read the summary at the top for a one-line, plain-language statement of how many preservation events are recorded and across how many lifecycle stages.
3. Scan the timeline, oldest first, to follow the lifecycle from ingest forward. Each event shows its outcome as a coloured badge (green success, amber warning, red failure).
4. Follow the trust links at the foot of the page to the Authenticity Report and the AI Inference Provenance Explorer for the same record, to assemble the full trust picture.
5. Fetch the JSON companion at /preservation-timeline/{idOrSlug}.json for a machine-readable copy.

Frequently asked questions

Why does a published record show no preservation events? Its digital objects may pre-date preservation logging, or no preservation step has been recorded for them yet. That does not mean anything is wrong - only that no automated preservation step is on file.

Is this the same as the Authenticity Report? No. The Authenticity Report consolidates C2PA content-credentials / signing and the whole-record provenance verdict. The Preservation Timeline is the PREMIS-style lifecycle of the bits: ingest, fixity, format identification, migration, virus scan. The two are complementary and link to each other.

Does opening the page change anything? No. The page is strictly read-only. It runs no preservation action, re-verifies nothing, and writes nothing.