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Publishing, Scheduling, and Unpublishing

Nothing is visible on the Public Portal until you publish it. You can publish an individual item, a whole accession, a fonds (with its descendants), or a dossier — each independently.

Publishing to the portal requires an org admin or reviewer role. Admins can also force a publish past warnings.

Publishing​

Click Publish to Portal on the record you want to make public (accession, fonds, item, or dossier page). A dialog opens with a pre-flight summary:

  • Total files and how many are publishable
  • Unreviewed files — items that haven't been through review yet
  • PII-flagged and high-sensitivity files — items the AI has flagged for human attention
  • Files with missing rights information

Blockers must be resolved (or force-published by an admin); warnings are shown for you to read carefully but don't stop publication. An outcome line tells you plainly what will happen: how many accepted items become publicly visible with metadata and thumbnails, and whether previews or full files will also be shown (governed by your default disclosure settings for the accession).

For a fonds, you can also set an optional public title, description, and image that override the internal ones on the portal, and choose whether to cascade — publish descendant collections too (their own record groups and items are not published automatically; publish those separately).

Click Publish.

Disclosure settings — what visitors can search and see​

When you publish a record, you can control what metadata and text are visible to portal visitors — and importantly, what they can find via search:

  • Show metadata publicly — toggles whether the metadata fields (title, creator, subjects, dates, condition, etc.) are displayed on the public item page. When off, visitors see only the filename and file preview. Search respects this setting: when metadata is hidden, suppressed fields won't match in portal search results.
  • Make transcript searchable — determines whether OCR'd text, audio/video transcripts, or handwritten text transcription are indexed for portal search. When off, the file is still published and viewable, but text within it won't match search queries.

These settings ensure that sensitive or restricted information (like provenance notes, donor details, or embargoed content) genuinely stay private — visitors cannot find or confirm the existence of suppressed text via search.

The search security layer: the portal's search engine uses a separate, public-only text index that honours both of these flags. It's mathematically impossible for a search to leak text that's marked as non-searchable — there's no fallback or workaround.

Scheduling​

In the same dialog, set Publish later to a future date and time instead of clicking Publish immediately. The record is saved as Scheduled and becomes public automatically at the chosen time — no need to come back and click Publish again.

Scheduled items show a Scheduled status wherever publish status is shown, right up until the scheduled moment.

Unpublishing​

Click the same button (now showing Published or Scheduled) to open the unpublish dialog. This removes the record from the public portal — visitors can no longer see it. You can add a reason (e.g. "Takedown request; rights review"), which is recorded in the audit log alongside who unpublished it and when.

Unpublishing doesn't delete anything internally — the record stays exactly as it was in your archive, just no longer shown publicly.

The Public Portal hub​

Dashboard → Public Portal gathers everything in one place, for admins and reviewers:

  • Published content — every published or scheduled record across all types, with a link to view it live on the portal and per-row/bulk unpublish
  • Activity — an audit trail of publish/unpublish/schedule actions
  • Analytics — visitor view counts (see Access tokens, analytics, and AI Explore)
  • Settings — a shortcut into the same Settings → Public Portal configuration

See also​