One of the things that I keep coming back to in our digital library system are the states that an object can be in and how that affects various aspects of our system.  Hopefully this post can explain some of them and how they are currently implemented locally.

Hidden vs Non-Hidden

Our main distinction once an item is in our system is if it is hidden or not.

Hidden means that it is not viewable by any of our users and that it is only available in our internal Edit system where a metadata record and basic access exists to the item. If a request for this items comes in through our public facing digital library interfaces,  the user will receive a “404 Not Found” response from our system.