Not sure if I'm quite understanding how you're thinking about this, but in a short story collection, there will often be a little blurb at the beginning or end of each piece, saying things like where it was first published, or a longer author note about why they wrote it or whatever. I think if you did something similar with metadata/author notes it would seem pretty natural.

(I download PDFs of all my stuff in the name of not trusting the internet, or at least the AO3, to last forever.)