Mechanism for removing/unpublishing records

[CrispinF]

The mechanisms for submitting records do not provide any way of removing records once added, as far as I can tell.

Two scenarios where this is required are
a) records that must be removed for some reason (e.g. records that should never have been published in the first place) - this is rare, but can be urgent, requiring action within hours; and
b) records that are deleted/deprecated in the source dataset; this is less urgent.

For the 'External API Harvesting' approach (that will be used by the majority of HERs) this could be achieved by:
i) re-fetching the entire HER dataset at regular intervals (e.g. every day or couple of days). This addresses both scenarios, if it can be done frequently enough.
ii) adding a method to the HER APIs for retrieving a list of records that should not be published; where any of these exist in the Heritage Gateway dataset they would then be removed. This addresses scenario (a), but not necessarily (b) so solution (i) would also be needed, though the repeat interval could be larger.
These solutions maintain the advantage that the process is fully automated, with the HER needing only to manage their own records.