York University Libraries foresees times when it may be necessary to remove items from the institutional repository as per the deposit agreement. To avoid loss of the historical record, all such transactions will be traced in the form of a note in the field of the Dublin Core record. The content of the note should be one of the following:

• removed from view at request of the author;
• removed from view at the discretion of York University;
• removed from view at the discretion of York University Libraries;
• removed from view by legal order;
• removed from view at community's discretion.

Since any IR item that has existed at some time may have been cited, we will always supply a "tombstone" when the item is requested, which will include the original metadata (for verification) plus one of the above withdrawal statements in place of the link to the object. The metadata will be visible, but not searchable. These items will also be made unavailable for metadata harvesting.