Way to design "history" in DBs

I am creating a new relational database and don't know the best way to design the following special requirement:

I have a table of entities (items) that are received, stored in various places, and treated in several possible ways. The user's requirement is now that not only the actual storage position and state of each item can be queried, but also its "history". That is, he wants to query when the item was received, when it was dislocated, and when it was treated in which way by which employee.
You could think of a logfile that every item carries along, where all relevant happenings are written to.

Are there common ways how to design such a thing in an E-R model?

Is it the best idea to just add a "history" entity where the events are recorded as plain text?
This would mean a big set of entries into the "history" table for every single item in the database.

Thanks for any thoughts and ideas
Bernhard Received on Tue Feb 29 2000 - 00:00:00 CET