Add Research Notes
Staff and volunteers can document observations, questions, comparisons, and conclusions under their own names.
Artifact Research
Keep the evidence, reasoning, and questions—not just the final catalog wording.
MCVM gives each artifact a durable, private Research History for staff notes, sources, retained AI analysis, alternative identifications, and later corrections.
A genuine museum research layer
Research remains useful without becoming an official fact.
An artifact record answers what the museum currently catalogs. Research History preserves how people investigated the object, what evidence they used, what remains uncertain, and how conclusions changed.
Catalog data stays authoritative.
Research never silently rewrites the artifact record.
Research stays private.
It is excluded from Public Collection, QR output, Museum Book, and ordinary public exports.
Complete preservation still applies.
Research is included in Complete Backup, full-fidelity migration, and dedicated internal export.
Research History
Built for investigation that develops over time.
Connect Sources and Evidence
Reusable sources and entry-to-source links keep supporting material connected to the reasoning it informed.
Review Before Finalizing
Staff drafts may be edited and submitted as Pending Review. A Supervisor or Owner decides when they join finalized history.
Correct Without Erasing
Finalized entries are append-only. A changed conclusion creates a linked correction or superseding entry.
Two ways to contribute
Human research and AI assistance share the history, not the authority.
Add a Research Note
Record museum research directly, add sources, save a draft, and follow the museum's review process.
Research an Artifact
Request deeper multi-image analysis, review evidence and alternatives, then explicitly choose whether to save the analysis to Research History.
Deliberate retention
Saving research and changing the catalog are separate decisions.
After Artifact Research, MCVM presents read-only Research Analysis and individually reviewable Catalog Suggestions. The curator may save the analysis, apply selected suggestions, do both, or do neither. Closing an unsaved successful analysis prompts the user to save, discard, or cancel.