Beyond Online Access: A Provenance and Rights-Aware Framework for African Humanities Resource Discovery

Digital discovery enables researchers to locate distributed humanities resources, but online visibility does not establish the location, legal status or permissible computational use of the works described. This study examines a provenance- and rights-aware discovery framework implemented through the African Humanities Open Data Observatory (AHODO). Using a design-based case study of the frozen, audited v0.3 discovery release (11,650 records), it investigates how metadata design can distinguish holding geography from subject geography, associate rights evidence with particular resource components, and represent copyright, computational reuse, AI-specific terms and community governance as separate dimensions. Descriptive examination of the release shows that 241 records are attributed to holding institutions in Zimbabwe whereas 154 establish Zimbabwe as subject geography. Across the full release, 11,496 records (98.7%) lack an established subject country; 4,950 (42.5%) have no stated language. Reviewed cases also illustrate why licence evidence attached to catalogue text or a particular translated edition must not be inherited by other linked components. Rather than measuring system performance or inferring copyright outcomes, the article contributes an evidence-bounded implementation pattern for interpreting heterogeneous cultural heritage metadata. It argues that explicit uncertainty and component-scoped evidence are integral to trustworthy discovery, while recognising that metadata records cannot themselves establish community consent.