Describing authority records
An authority record describes a person, a family or a corporate body: who created, received, kept or is named in the records. In RiC they are agents, a rico:Person, rico:Family or rico:CorporateBody, described once and joined by relations to every record, place and activity they belong with.
The screens are under Describe, Authority records (/agents).
Making one
- Open Authority records and choose New.
- Say whether it is a person, a family or a corporate body, and give its authorised form of name.
- Save. It is a draft until it is published, as every description is.
While describing a unit you can also make a creator on the spot from the creators panel, then return to the authority record later to fill it out.
What it holds
The page follows the ISAAR(CPF) areas, each field showing the RiC term it is recorded as:
- Identity: the kind of entity, its authorised form of name and its other names, and its identifiers.
- Description: dates of existence, history, places, legal status, functions, occupations and activities, mandates, internal structure and general context.
- Relationships: other agents it is joined to, such as a parent, an employer or a member of a family, each typed by its RiC-O property and with its dates.
- Control: rules and conventions, status, level of detail, languages and scripts, sources and maintenance notes.
Names. An agent can have as many names as it needs, each with its type: authorised, parallel, standardised, other, historical or abbreviated, each in its language and with the dates it was used. Any published name finds the agent in a search.
Dates are kept as RiC date ranges: birth and death for a person, existence for any agent.
Contact points hold addresses, telephones and e-mail for an agent that has them.
Duplicates, merging and splitting
Duplicates (/agents/duplicates) lists pairs of agents whose names look alike. For each, choose Merge to keep one and fold the other into it, every relation and name moving with it; or Not a duplicate to stop it being offered again. A merge is recorded in the audit log, and the merged agent is deprecated: its IRI then says it was merged, and points to the one kept.
Split does the opposite: it takes an agent that turned out to be two people and makes a second from it, with the names and relations you move across.
Other things on its page
- EAC-CPF: the authority record exported as EAC-CPF (the 2010 schema).
- Print: the record to read or print.
- The records it is joined to, and its other relations, each linking through.
Who may do what
Anyone may read a published authority record in the public catalogue. Contributors and up create and change them; editors and administrators publish, merge and delete.