Institutional Omission as Record Governance: Definition, Mechanisms, and Implications for Cultural Evidence

Abstract Institutional decisions regarding acquisition, documentation, cataloguing, and access are often framed as administrative processes that follow cultural production. This article argues instead that such decisions function as a form of governance over the cultural record itself. It formalizes institutional omission as an analytical concept describing how selective absence, deferral, or non-documentation operates as authorship over evidentiary conditions, shaping attribution, provenance continuity, and the reliability of historical verification. Distinct from bias, erasure, or neglect, institutional omission produces structured absences that delimit what may be known, cited, and transmitted in future scholarship. The article defines the concept, distinguishes it from adjacent frameworks, and proposes a taxonomy of omission mechanisms with observable indicators. By treating omission as a constitutive element of record formation rather than a peripheral failure, this framework provides scholars and institutions with tools for auditing documentation practices and strengthening long-term cultural memory integrity.