Towards the Development of a National Archival Authority File in France: An Approach to Implement EAC-CPF

Abstract

A project aiming to develop a national authority file describing local public organizations since 1800 was launched by the Association of French Archivists and the Directorate of French Archives. The scope is to produce a set of standardized forms of names, as well as pattern records, easily reusable by territorial archival institutions for their needs to establish descriptions for individual records creators. To build a coherent strategy for the archives at the national level, recommendations are being developed with respect to the reuse of these patterns. Another aspect is that of the need to uniquely identify the described individual entities, by assigning a unique, persistent, standard identifier both for use in local business applications used by archival institutions and electronic records systems, and for use with Semantic Web technologies in a global environment.

KEYWORDS:

• archival authority data
• ISAAR(CPF)
• EAC-CPF
• ICA-AtoM software
• International Standard Name Identifier
• local archival institutions

Notes

¹ Stefano Vitali, “International Archival Descriptive Standards: Origins, Developments and Perspectives for the Next Future,” II. kongres hrvatskih arhivista, Dubrovnik, 2005. Accessed February 25, 2014, http://www.had-info.hr/rad-drustva/izlaganja/79-vitali-stefano-international-archival

² In the administrative division of France, the department (French: “département”) is one of the three levels of government below the national level, between the region and the commune.

³ The Cultural Heritage Code is accessible online from the site Legifrance devoted to French legislation. Reference of the article R. 212-62 of this code, accessed February 25, 2014, http://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/affichCodeArticle.do?cidTexte=LEGITEXT000006074236&idArticle=LEGIARTI000024-240468&dateTexte=&categorieLien=cid

⁴ More information about the Archives Portal Europe network of excellence is available at: http://www.apex-project.eu (Accessed February 25, 2014).

⁵ This working group is coordinated by Isabelle Chave (Archives nationales [National Archives]) and Claire Sibille-de Grimoüard (Service interministériel des archives de France [Directorate of French Archives]) and is composed of Agnès d’Angio-Barros (Ministère de l’Économie, des Finances et de l’industrie [Ministry of the Economy, Finance and Industry]), Florence Clavaud (Archives nationales), Pascale Étiennette (Archives départementales de Meurthe-et-Moselle), Pascal Geneste (Archives départementales de la Gironde), François Giustiniani (Archives départementales des Hautes-Pyrénées), Agnès Goudail (Archives départementales de la Loire), Bénédicte Grailles-Marcilloux (Université d’Angers), Delphine Jamet (Archives départementales de la Gironde), Antoine Meissonnier (Service interministériel des Archives de France), Alice Motte (Service interministériel des archives de France), Vincent Mollet (Archives départementales du Gard), Laurent Pons (Archives départementales du Tarn), Mélanie Rebours (Service interministériel des Archives de France), Aude Rœlly (Service interministériel des Archives de France), Héloïse Rouge (Archives départementales des Bouches-du-Rhône), Sébastien Studer (Service interministériel des Archives de France), and Anne-Isabelle Vidal (Archives nationales d’outre-mer [National Archives of Overseas Territories]).

⁶ This platform is available at: https://www.ica-atom.org/aaf/ (Accessed February 25, 2014).

⁷ See: http://catalogue.bnf.fr (Accessed February 25, 2014).

⁸ See the note published on the blog ALMA (Archives, books, manuscripts and other information media: http://alma.hypotheses.org/622 (Accessed February 25, 2014).

⁹ NF Z 44-060 (déc. 1996): Catalogue d’auteurs et d’anonymes: forme et structure des vedettes de collectivités-auteurs

¹⁰ The Thesaurus for Indexing Local Archives and other controlled vocabularies of the French Ministry of Culture and Communication are available as Linked Data at: http://data.culture.fr/thesaurus/ (Accessed February 25, 2014).

¹¹ The ICA-AtoM official website is at: https://www.ica-atom.org/ The current release of ICA-AtoM is 1.3.1. However, the company Artefactual Systems, which is the developer of ICA-AtoM, launched an “AtoM 2.0.0” release in September 2013. The biggest change has been the move to using Elasticsearch, an open source, distributed search server based on Apache Lucene, which acts as AtoM's new search and analytic engine. See https://www.accesstomemory.org/en/ and http://demo.accesstomemory.org/ (Accessed February 25, 2014).

¹² See http://www.archivistes.org/IMG/pdf/Manuel-AtoM_2012.pdf (Accessed February 25, 2014).

¹³ See http://www.archivistes.org/Notices-d-autorite-producteurs-1781#le-referentiel-national-des-formes (Accessed February 25, 2014).

¹⁴ See http://www.archivistes.org/Notices-d-autorite-producteurs,1781 (Accessed February 25, 2014).

¹⁵ See the portal “Gironde Archives En Ligne” (GAEL): http://gael.gironde.fr/ (Accessed February 25, 2014).

¹⁶ The unique French business identification number referring to each business location a company may have (SIRET) is a 14 digit number.

¹⁷ The unique French business identification number SIREN is a 9 digit number requested by all French administration when dealing with companies. SIRET is built on the SIREN number (SIREN + 5 digits).

¹⁸ The ISNI central database can be freely accessed from the ISNI official website www.isni.org

¹⁹ The National Library of France established an ISNI Registration Agency in January 2014. For more information, see http://www.bnf.fr/en/professionals/isni_about/s.isni_registration_agency.html?first_Art=non (Accessed February 25, 2014).

²⁰ The ISNI standard states: “This International Standard specifies the International Standard name identifier (ISNI) for the identification of public identities of parties, i.e. the identities used publicly by parties involved throughout the media content industries in the creation, production, management and content distribution chains. The ISNI system uniquely identifies public identities across multiple fields of creative activity and provides a tool for disambiguating public identities that might otherwise be confused” ISO 27729:2012; Information and documentation—International standard name identifier (ISNI)

²¹ The BORA database is available at http://daf.archivesdefrance.culture.gouv.fr/sdx-222-daf-bora-ap/ap/ (Accessed February 25, 2014).