FEDPA Policy on Restricted Collections, Ethical Preservation, and Controlled Access (v1.1)

This document establishes the normative policy governing restricted collections within the Freemasonry Ethnosphere Digital Preservation Archive (FEDPA). It defines the ethical, legal, and curatorial conditions under which cultural and historical materials may be documented and preserved when open public access is not possible, while ensuring full transparency of metadata, provenance, and curatorial rationale. The policy articulates a strict separation between archiving, custody, access, and publication, and affirms the core principle that within FEDPA metadata are always public, even when access to digital objects is restricted or closed. Legitimate grounds for restriction are limited to legal, ethical, and contractual considerations, explicitly excluding symbolic authority, active initiatory hierarchies, doctrinal transmission, or undocumented institutional convenience as valid justifications. This document operates as a normative complement to the FEDPA Curatorial, Ethical, and Citation Framework (v1.1) and provides a governance model for restricted and metadata-only records deposited in open research infrastructures such as Zenodo. It is intended to be citable, auditable, and reusable, and may be adapted by other cultural heritage initiatives seeking to preserve sensitive or restricted materials while maintaining academic credibility, legal compliance, and institutional independence. Preservation under this policy does not imply endorsement. FEDPA operates strictly within a non-doctrinal, non-initiatory, and non-operational institutional framework.