Narrative Licence: An Evidence-Bounded Protocol for Multivocal Museum Storytelling from Reused Object Records

Generative systems can produce fluent museum prose, but fluency does not show whether a sentence is warranted by an object record. This article proposes Narrative Licence, a protocol that classifies each candidate sentence as ATTESTED, INFERRED or NOT LICENSED against named metadata fields and withholds unlicensed sentences before public release. The framework comprises an ordered decision procedure, a field-to-licence map, three evidence-partitioned institutional voices, and a matched comparison of an unconstrained prompt with a licence-bounded pipeline. A completed pre-generation audit of the public TimeTravel release (10,250 records) found quoted inscriptions in 14.9%, recorded findspots in 68.2% and all ten licence-bearing fields in 2.9% of records, and showed that 64% of quoted inscriptions come from coin records. A deterministic working sample of 48 records was drawn in three strata. A worked example traces one record from source fields to released gallery text. The planned confirmatory evaluation will estimate the paired difference in released unlicensed-sentence rate, with coherence and readability as secondary outcomes. No effectiveness result is reported. Whether the protocol reduces unlicensed claims without degrading narrative quality remains to be tested.