Lacuna: A Specification for Provenance Records with Declared Absence
A specification for provenance records with declared absence.
A record of who has held an object, and when, in which a gap is written down with the same standing as a fact.
Most records leave a field blank when they do not know. A blank cannot tell the next reader whether the fact was never looked for, was looked for and not found, cannot be recovered by anyone, or does not apply to this object. Lacuna makes that distinction a requirement. Every absence is an entry that names which kind it is and why. Every withheld fact names who withheld it. A record with declared gaps is more trustworthy than one that looks complete, because a record that looks complete cannot be told apart from one that was never checked.
The four kinds of absence
Each state tells the reader what to do next. That is the test the vocabulary has to pass: a vocabulary whose members produce the same action is one state wearing four names.
| state | meaning | what a reader should do |
|---|---|---|
| unknowable | the fact cannot be recovered by anyone | stop looking |
| not applicable | the question does not arise for this object | stop asking |
| not yet obtained | the fact exists and has not been collected | this is work, and it can be closed |
| never required | the question is not proper to ask here | do not ask |
What it is not
It does not authenticate anything. A certificate says what an object is at one moment. This record says who held it, when, and what is not known, over time. A certificate can be an input to the record. It is never the record.
Where it stands
Published as an open specification, to establish prior art and to be used. Anyone may implement it, and the Creative Commons Attribution license on the text requires that it be credited. The current version is 0.7, of 13 October 2026; the first was published on 22 August 2026, and every version is deposited with a permanent identifier, so a record written to one version can always be read against it.
If you keep records, what this gives you
A record that says what it does not know is a record that can be trusted, and a record that can be trusted can be loaned against, insured, published, and handed on.
If you keep a museum's or an archive's records, every search you have already done becomes visible in the entry itself. The object that was checked and the object that was never checked no longer look the same, and the work your department has done stops disappearing into a blank field.
If you keep the records of an estate, a studio, or a maker, the account of each work is written while the person who knows it is still in the room, in their words, dated, and marked as theirs. The day a work leaves, that record is what it carries.
If you lend, insure, or buy, you are reading a record whose gaps are declared, which is the only kind whose gaps can be priced. You are no longer guessing which silences matter.
If you keep one object in your own house, the method is the same, and it is open. The object goes forward with its story attached, including the parts nobody knows, said plainly.
We build records to this specification, for one object or for a collection, and we work with the people who keep records to fit it to theirs. If that is you, write, and tell us what you keep.
Read it
- The full specification, as a page
- Markdown
- https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22063353 (the identifier that always resolves to the newest version)
Version 0.7, 13 October 2026. First published 22 August 2026. License CC BY 4.0.
Banks, C. (2026). Lacuna: A Specification for Provenance Records with Declared Absence. Objects of Affection Collection.