RMP.2:5.3 - Historical Source-Critical Case

An archive group asks whether a maintenance-practice change followed Directive-D or emerged earlier. Serious options are: stop on a current authenticated dated record; use a historical/source-critical design comparing provenance, chronology, workshop records, silences, and rival interpretations; or synthesize an already traced contested corpus when the question is corpus-level.

If the archive owner confirms access and provenance for the discriminating records, a historical/source-critical decision may be completed with only non-selection-changing transcription and locator conventions left. If provenance or access to the decisive record family remains unresolved and one result supports a chronology comparison while another eliminates it, that still-needed selection receives ResearchDesignHold. Do not substitute an experimental hierarchy or treat a reporting checklist as the design.

For a narrow chronology question, suppose one authenticated workshop series is the only presently accessible material that could distinguish practice before and after the directive. An online index and another scan format expose the same records and do not supply further design relations. A source-critical examination fits the two available investigator-days, its provenance and access are qualified, and an earlier or later dated entry would change the bounded chronology claim. This one serious research option can warrant ResearchDesignDecision; two invented designs add nothing. If that examination instead needs twenty investigator-days, supplied resource limits leave only two, and no feasible reduction preserves the discriminating relation, retain the unresolved chronology and return QualifiedNoNewStudy for that current allocation. A newly accessible independent ledger could change both the worthwhile comparison and the choice.