Authority records

Describes corporate bodies, persons or families that are associated with the creation and maintenance of archives, such as creator, donor or custodian.

ESSArch adheres to ISAAR (CPF), 2nd Edition and comes with a standard set of controlled vocabularies for typed fields which can be customized or supplemented by additional values.

Authority Records are created and controlled separately from archival (resource) descriptions in ESSArch and are associated by linking.

By default there is three main types of Authority records in ESSArch:

  • Person

  • Family

  • Corporate Body

These three main types can be further subdivided by the organization needs or other requirements of subdivision i.e.

  • Corporate body - State agency

  • Family - Royal Family

The ICA Standards section provides a detailed documentation of the entry fields of an authority record in ESSArch, their relation to ISAAR-CPF and default values available from a standard installation.

Creating and managing authority records

Warning

Be careful when updating Authority records! Updating of an Authority record changes it for every link to the referenced record.

Creating a new authority record

A new authority record can be created by clicking the new button under the authority record section of ESSArch.

When initially creating an authority record the following fields are required for all types of authority records:

  • Type

  • Name (Authorized form)

  • Language

  • Reference code (institutional code)

  • Create date (Auto populated)

New authority record form

New authority record form

Note

For Authority records of type person the name field is automatically separated into Firstname and Lastname fields.

Detail view of newly created authority record

Detail view of newly created authority record

Adding other name forms

By clicking the add button in the names subsection one can record additional name forms. i.e. Parallel forms of name, Standardized forms of name according to other rules and Other forms of name.

Form for adding names

After the additional name form has been saved the record is available under the Names section.

Name section overview after adding new record

Adding history, descriptive texts and notes

In ESSArch one can have multiple descriptive texts / notes.

Warning

Custom note types will in future EAC exports be exported as <maintenanceEvent> !

Standard type of notes that can be used in ESSArch:

  • Biography/History

  • Maintenance

  • Internal structures

  • Genealogy

  • General context

To add a new descriptive text click on the History or Remarks tab and then the add button.

Remarks detail page

From the dropdown menu choose the appropriate note type, add text and click add to save.

Add new note form

Creating relations

Relationships with other corporate bodies, persons and families can be described by linking authority records.

Relationship types in ESSArch are mirrored which means that if a relation is created on one authority record the relation will automatically be mirrored when viewing the referenced authority record.

Type

Mirrored Type

business partner

business partner

successor

predecessor

predecessor

successor

owned by

owner of

owner of

owned by

controlling

controlled

controlled

controlling

subordinate

superior

superior

subordinate

To add a relation from one authority record to another click the add button in the related authority records section.

overview of related authority records table