International standards on archival authority control
In the international community, archival authority control, based on the analysis of the context of creation of fonds and the formalisation of the name of the creator, is regulated in four standardised ways:
- Content standards
- Structure standards
- Encoding standards
- Data value standards
The International Standard Archival Authority Record for Corporate Bodies, Persons and Families (ISAAR (CPF)) is a structure standard, developed by the ICA and was first released in 1996, with its latest version in 2004.
Encoding standards are developed to facilitate data exchange. They are based on XML interchange formats. In this process, the recognition of the importance of the context of the production of the documents was one of the most significant steps. The 1994 edition of the General International Standard Archival Description (ISAD(G)), in the description of area's context, as well as the 1996 ISAAR (CPF), point I.2 acknowledged that although the context information could be integrated into the description of the archival unit, it could also be treated independently by combining it with other elements of the description. In this case, information on the context, if done separately from the units of description, has more value for the exchange of information. Thus different holdings - national or international - sharing fonds with the same creator can exchange information more easily, establishing relationships among them. The name of the creator happens to be considered the main access point to retrieve context information. This exchange can be conducted only if the name of the producer is controlled under authority control.
These new ideas started developing in the 1980s; the second version of the Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules (AACR) was being reviewed. Australia, Canada and the United Kingdom have worked towards this direction by publishing their archival description standards, such as the Canadian Rules for Archival Descriptions (RAD) or the Manual for Archival Description (MAD) (see: Michael Cook and Margaret Procter, A manual of archival description, 2nd ed., Aldershot, 1989) in 1986. All these works seek to be both content standards and structure, but the English MAD also was a proposing standard for structuring finding aids.
The RAD, as the American Describing archives: a Content Standard (DACS) as we see later, include a statement of principle for the description at the beginning of the rules. In this case the P.04 reads “Creators of archival material must be described. A description of the functions and activities of the creator(s) […] is important to understanding the context in which they were created”. The standards contain rules for presenting access point in chapter 21: provenance access point (at different levels of descriptions), author access point and other non-subjects access points (see: Bureau of Canadian Archivists (ed.), Rules for Archival Description (RAD), Ottawa, 1990, revised version, July 2008).
Between 1990 and 1996 the ICA/DDS produced three documents that need to be combined in order to be understood:
- the Statement of Principles regarding Archival Description (1993),
- the ISAD(G) (General International Standard Archival Description) (1994)
- the ISAAR (CPF) (International Standard Archival Authority Record for Corporate Bodies, Persons and Families) (1995).
The most innovative aspect included the adoption of concepts borrowed from the library environment such as access points and authority control, although initially these were not widely accepted (see Stibbe (1998) for more information about works, decisions and results of this group). Between 1996 and 2004, a process of revision of ISAAR (CPF) was undertaken in order to give consistency to the standard (see: Dagmar Parer and Michael Fox, The Internal Standard Archival Authority Record for Corporate Bodies, Persons and Families (ICA) and the essential Data Elements for Internationally Shared Resource Authority Record (IFLA): A comparison and Report, 1998). There has been a major change in the second and final version of ISAAR (CPF) regarding the introduction of concepts taken from entity-relationship (note: The entity-relationship model is based on the most widespread tools for creating representation models by computer scientific); that is, accepting the principle that there is no “one-to-one relationship” anymore between creators when associated with a single fond only but more of a “many-to-many relationships” between the creator and its fonds (see: Stefano Vitali, The second edition of ISAAR (CPF) and authority control in system for archival descriptive system, 2004, http://www.sba.unifi.it/ac/relazioni/vitali_eng.pdf).
ISAAR (CPF) is mainly a tool for the authority control of the names of the creator of archives, and therefore a tool to standardise as an “authorized [sic] form of the name”. It simply refers to the national rules of the subjects (already existence in libraries) or to create them ex-novo. As a tool to optimise access and search, ISAAR (CPF) has similarities and concurrences with the authority control of authors in library catalogues, but looking more broadly than the single author of a work, or demonstration purpose and the requirements and information required to document the context of creation. The area of identity caters for the archival authorities’ needs of dates of existence, institutional history, functions and activities, mandates and legal sources, internal structure or historical context.
The “Relationship area” is without doubt, the most powerful tool of the standard, and includes the influence of the fledgling EAC-CPF standard. It implies the possibility of relationships between creators, as well as widens the scope of relations with other sources (museums, libraries, and other resources), as well as forms of the name standard with other rules. The field of rules, standards and sources become essential for the exchange of information.
