Journal of Archival Organization, 12:98117, 2015

Published with license by Taylor & Francis

ISSN: 1533-2748 print / 1533-2756 online
DOI: 10.1080/15332748.2015.1000207

Towards the Development of a National

Archival Authority File in France: An Approach
to Implement EAC-CPF

ISABELLE CHAVE
Archives Nationales, Pierreffitte-sur-Seine, France

CLAIRE SIBILLE-DE GRIMOUARD

Service Interministeriel des Archives de France, Paris, France

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 institu-
tions for their needs to establish descriptions for individual records
creators. To build a coherent strategy for the archives at the na-
tional 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

Isabelle Chave and Claire Sibille-de Grimouard

Address correspondence to Claire Sibille-de Grimouard, Direction Generale des
Patrimoines, Service Interministeriel des Archives de France, Sous-Direction de la Poli-
tique Archivistique, 56, rue des Francs-Bourgeois, 75 141, Paris Cedex 03, France. E-mail:
Claire.sibille@culture.gouv.fr
Color versions of one or more of the figures in the article can be found online at
www.tandfonline.com/wjao.

98
 An Approach to Implement EAC-CPF 99

INTRODUCTION

As Stefano Vitali noted in 2005,1 the International Standard Archival Au-

thority Record for Corporate Bodies, Persons and Families or ISAAR(CPF)
introduced in descriptive practices the principle of separate and linked de-
scription of records and creators along with the authority control of names of
creators to manage the many-to-many relationships between archival fonds
and their creators. Organizations and individuals can thus be related to se-
ries and sets of records they actually created, independently from the fonds
that those series and records belong to. In addition, this approach is core to
interoperability across systems and domains. Sharing authority data enables
you to navigate between systems and to retrieve meaningful information
across domains. This approach reached its maturity in 2010 with the release
of the XML schema EAC-CPF, used not only by archival institutions but also
by other information professions, including libraries, as part of projects fed-
erating resources from various sources on corporate bodies, persons, and
families.
With the ever-growing importance of authority data, French archivists
and librarians collaborate in the same expert working groups within the
French Association of Standardization, sharing expertise and professional
concerns. Archival institutions are building their own authority data, even
if they continue to use the authority files of the National Library of France
as a national reference tool to build standardized access points (form and
structure of headingsused forms of name) for archival description. Various
projects implementing EAC-CPF are being carried out in France, both by
national archives and by territorial archives.
This article will present a collaborative project that aims to create na-
tional archival authority files describing local services of the French State
administration, thus enabling archivists to refer to nationally standardized
forms of names, to put together pieces of information about the same cat-
egory of records creators, to establish relationships between creators, and
to describe these relationships in a standardized way. The first section de-
scribes the background of this collaborative project and explains why the
national authority files of the National Library of France, though a reference
tool at national level, cannot fully satisfy the needs of archival institutions.
In the second section, the methodological approach is presented, including
the deliverables, the implementation of standards, the development of best
practices, and the first results. The final section deals with the issues and
perspectives regarding the identification codes, and the need in France for
coordinating and combining these different initiatives around authority data.

BACKGROUND

French archival institutions have to prepare authority records describing the

creators of the archival materials they hold, using ISAAR(CPF) to ensure
100 I. Chave and C. Sibille-de Grimouard

consistency and to enable data exchange. As public organizations in France

are very similar in the different administrative divisions,2 it was decided to
address this issue centrally and as part of a collaborative work. According
to the article R. 212-62 of the Code of Cultural Heritage,3 the departmental
archives (in French: archives departementales) keep

archives of the pre-French Revolution provincial and local institutions

seized by the revolutionaries (parliaments, chartered cities, abbeys,
churches, etc.);
archives of departmental and territorial services since the French Revolu-
tion;
archives of local services of the State administration and of public agencies
whose headquarters are located in the departments;
notarial records created by notaries of the departments;
records created by small towns which may be transferred to departmental
archives; and
private archives that may be deposited or whose ownership may be trans-
ferred to the departmental councils by gift, bequest, or purchase; it is also
quite common that private fonds are physically separated and held by
several archival institutions.

Thus, any territorial archival institution will need to create authority records
for the institutions that are creators of records in their charge. However, as
part of the French administration, institutions in charge of functions (and its
related subfunctions) of one domain exist all over the different administrative
divisions of the French territory and perform their activity each in its admin-
istrative division. Consequently institutions of the same type, with the same
organization, created to perform locally functions that have been defined
centrally by law exist all over the French territory. While creating authority
records for each of these individual institutions, the high level information
will be the same, or will necessarily follow the same structure. Specific in-
formation is however to be created for each local institution. For instance,
the Archives de Paris will have to create an authority record describing the
Tribunal de grande instance de Paris and the Archives departementales
de Gironde (Bordeaux) will have to create another one about the Tribunal
de grande instance de Bordeaux [ordinary courts of original jurisdiction].
The Archives departementales du Nord (Lille) will have to describe the Di-
rection regionale de lenvironnement, de lamenagement et du logement
du Nord-Pas-de-Calais whereas the Archives departementales de Moselle
(Metz) will have to provide information about the Direction regionale de
lenvironnement, de lamenagement et du logement de Lorraine [regional
environment, planning and housing agencies].
Moreover, French archivists are starting to perceive that the reference
to national standardized forms of names is necessary for interoperability
 An Approach to Implement EAC-CPF 101

with other information resources as archival descriptions (finding aids) and

contextual information (archival authority records) created in a distributed
way by different national institutions in France will be brought together
in international projects such as the Archives Portal Europe network of
Excellence (APEX).4 Indeed, within the Archives Portal Europe, archival
descriptions will be complemented with contextual information on indi-
viduals, families and corporations not only for display, but also for offer-
ing alternative access points to enrich the research to further networking
perspectives.
A collaborative project aiming to develop a national authority file de-
scribing local public organizations since 1800 was set up by the Association
of French Archivists in partnership with the Ministry of Culture and Com-
munication (Directorate of French Archives). A convention was signed in
September 2010 between the President of the Association and the Head of
the Directorate of French Archives. The projects scope consists of producing
lists of standardized authorized forms of names and standardized descrip-
tions of records creators (or in sharing the existing information) for each
individual institution (records creator) at a local level. For this purpose, pat-
terns would be proposed centrally to serve as basic documentary materials,
easily reusable by different archival institutions to describe their own records
creators. Every archivist can participate in the preparation of these patterns
in a shared environment. The scope is to provide the French archival com-
munity with an easy-to-use, interactive, and participatory tool. As partner
of this project, the Directorate of French Archives provides methodological
expertise: it defines the structure of authority records, it identifies elements
to use in addition to those that are mandatory according to ISAAR(CPF) and
EAC-CPF, and it defines rules for establishing authorized forms of names for
corporate bodies and persons (as local archives will also have to manage
information about persons). The Association of French Archivists coordinates
the preparation of authority records by the members of the working group
within the framework of a jointly defined multi-annual program.5 Then, pro-
fessionals may have access to the authority records on the platform of the
Association of French Archivists.6 To summarize, the workflow is the follow-
ing: archivists of departmental archives create in a collaborative production
tool generic authority records for types of institutions belonging to different
domains of activity (justice, agriculture, transportation, etc.); these generic
authority records are validated by the Directorate of French Archives; then,
other archivists of departmental archives can export these patterns from the
production platform in order to enrich them with local contextual informa-
tion by creating specific authority records for the respective local instances
of such institutions.
Prior to setting up this process, the possibility of directly using the
national authority files maintained by the National Library of France7 was
considered, both for economic reasons and for interoperability with the
102 I. Chave and C. Sibille-de Grimouard

library sector. However the decision was made to not use those files for the
following reasons:

Entities that archival institutions have to describe are not necessarily always
described in the National Library authority files. However, it is interesting to
note that the National Library authority files do include both patterns about
a general category of entity and specific authority records about individual
entities. We think this presents an opportunity to align the authority records
in both repositories.
The same standard is applied to build authorized forms of names (the first
purpose of the National Library authority records is the disambiguation of
names), but other data contained in the National Library authority files do
not meet the needs of territorial archives; contextual information, required
to describe records creators from the archival perspective, as recommended
by ISAAR(CPF), is not contained in the National Library authority records.
In the National Library authority files, there are no hierarchical or associa-
tive relationships (only chronological relationships are managed).
And last but not least, National Library authority records are in MARC
which not only poses technological problems, but also does not offer the
flexibility and richness of EAC-CPF which is created on purpose to satisfy
archives needs for authority records.

However, links are established to the National Library authority files

every time a pattern record has been established for a general category of
entity. These links are made possible in a web environment due to archival
resource key (ARK) persistent identifiers assigned to each of the author-
ity records of the National Library. As noted above, in France, archivists
and librarians participate in the same collaborative working groups about
descriptive standards and authority data. In recent years, there has been
some progress in pointing out similarities and differences between archival
and library authority records. In particular, French archivists and librarians
identified cross-institutional differences in terminology, use of access points,
relationships between authority records, and primary functions of authority
records. Such observations are a critical first step toward developing cross-
institutional standards. So, there is a strong desire to bring together archival
and bibliographic resources and to create information networks, in order
to:

make archival authority files less expensive to maintain;

ensure interoperability of archival and library authority records (e.g.: by
using same standards on building forms of names);
consolidate and augment archival authority records with additional data
from library authority records (e.g.: additional forms of names, etc.); and
 An Approach to Implement EAC-CPF 103

enable users to find, by means of the same authority record of a given

person or body, the descriptive record of the archival fonds created by this
person or by this body, the bibliographic records of the books the person
or the body authored, and so on.

METHODOLOGICAL APPROACH
Deliverables
Since Spring 2012, the working group has developed a list of authorized
forms of names to be published on the website of the Association of French
Archivists. The list is organized according to a thematic division between
thirteen major administrative areas:

1. General Administration;
2. Public Finance and Taxation;
3. Police and Civil Protection;
4. Agriculture;
5. Economy and Industry;
6. Education and Research;
7. Equipment and Environment;
8. Defense;
9. Justice;
10. Opinion and Religion;
11. Working Conditions and Employment;
12. Social Welfare and Health; and
13. Culture, Youth and Sports.

The list is based on the aggregation of various sources, such as records

creators of modern and contemporary fonds kept by territorial archives and
lists already done for some departments (Defense, Economy, and Finance).
In addition to this list of standardized forms of names, the working group
is producing standardized EAC-CPF authority records using a thematic logic
within an administrative area. Indeed, the production of one authority record
can lead us to produce other authority records describing related entities. The
first work item was Justice (Area 9). The next work item will be Working
Conditions and Employment (Area 11). Work is also shared according to the
area of expertise of the members of the working group. For example one of
the members of the working group began to produce authority records for
Public Finance and Taxation (Area 2), which happens to be his professional
field of expertise. Lastly, as part of their training, students in archival science
from Angers University produced authority records describing entities related
to the Social Welfare and Health domain (Area 12).8
104 I. Chave and C. Sibille-de Grimouard

Implementing Standards
ISAAR(CPF) is the reference content standard for the description of entities.
French archival institutions have a good knowledge of the standard, and
recognize its advantages, which can be summarized as follows:

it enables us to create authority records with standardized forms of name

of records creators;
it enables us to prepare authority records providing information on records
creators, as well as links to other records creators;
it enables us to create and manage separate but linked archival and con-
textual descriptions; and
it encourages the exchange of authority records.

As a standard, ISAAR(CPF) cannot stand alone. It must be complemented

by formats for communication of data, and a model to deal with search,
retrieval and linking in an archival information system. As we wanted to
provide archival institutions with reusable and real exchangeable authority
records, which could be imported into their information systems, our choice
went naturally to EAC-CPF, not only because it is the de facto communication
standard for archival authority records, but also because it is intended to be
used by archivists and by other communities, including libraries, as part
of efforts at federating resources from various sources related to corporate
bodies, persons and families.
As ISAAR(CPF) does not define specific rules for the creation of the
authorized form(s) of name, archival institutions are expected to adopt
existing rules or to develop new ones. In France, there is no equivalent
of the British NCA Rules for the Construction of Personal, Place and Corpo-
rate Names. We have already emphasized the importance for libraries and
archives to use the same standards whenever possible for interoperability
purposes. Therefore we use the standards developed by libraries on the
form and structure of headings, that is, the AFNOR (French national body
for standardization) standards, including, for corporate bodies, the standard
NF Z 44-060, Catalogue of Authors and Anonymous: Form and Structure of
HeadingsCorporate Bodies.9 Authority records are also indexed by func-
tions and administrative areas according to the thesaurus developed by the
Directorate of French Archives for indexing local archives.10
To produce and publish the authority records on the Internet, we use
ICA-AtoM, the free, open-source software developed by the Canadian com-
pany Artefactual Systems in collaboration with the International Council on
Archives (ICA) Program Commission and a growing network of international
partners.11 ICA-AtoM is web-based archival description software and is based
on ICA standards. There are many advantages.
 An Approach to Implement EAC-CPF 105

FIGURE 1 Using ICA-AtoM: Edit Page.

The software runs in a web environment, thus allowing contributors to

work in a network with the same edit page.
The tool is intuitive, easy to handle, it requires little training.
It does not require full knowledge of EAC-CPF, archivists familiar with
ISAAR(CPF) can use the tool (thanks to the compliance of EAC-CPF with
ISAAR(CPF)).
The production of authority records and their publication on the Internet
are almost simultaneous.
The data entered can be exported into XML/EAC-CPF by users and re-
imported into another information system.

We only use the module for adding/editing authority records compliant

with ISAAR(CPF). The edit pages include different fields, which are equiv-
alent to elements of the content descriptive standard; these elements are
grouped within descriptive areas (see Figure 1). ICA-AtoM enables us to
link easily different authority records describing entities. The default values
used to characterize the types of relationships with other corporate bod-
ies, persons, and families are the same as those proposed by ISAAR(CPF):
association, family, hierarchical, and temporal. However, these values can
be changed and other values (e.g., the additional values available for the
@cpfRelationType attribute of the <cpfRelation> element in EAC-CPF) can
be added in the table of terms.
106 I. Chave and C. Sibille-de Grimouard

Developing Best Practices

The working group developed guidelines for creating authority records
using ICA-AtoM. These guidelines enable participants to create homoge-
neous and standardized authority records.12 In addition to the manda-
tory elements of ISAAR and EAC-CPF, the guidelines recommend the
use of some optional elements (other forms of name, history, man-
dates, etc.) and provide guidance on how to inform the descriptive ele-
ments. Rules are also provided for the construction of authorized forms
of names for corporate bodies, adapting the AFNOR standards mentioned
above.
The development of guidelines raised many questions, starting with the
depth of contextual information (and resulting record length) included in a
record. As the objective of the project is to produce generic authority records
re-usable by any professional, it was decided that the records should include
information of national interest and that references to local specificities
should be avoided. The exclusion of locally relevant information helps to
reduce the length of the reference authority records. Specific historical con-
textual information is excluded (for instance, the specific place where a
Commercial Court was based), so the authority record only includes the date
of creation, the main changes and the date of dissolution of the category
of corporate body at the national level. The principle is the same for the
functions performed by this category of corporate body or for its internal
administrative structure: no local contextual information will be provided.
In addition, the combination of descriptive elements will vary depending
on whether we consider a specific authority record to be preliminary or
complete and according to repository-specific needs for describing records
creators. We realized that some descriptive elements, which are useful to
address local requirements, would be less relevant for the national pattern
records. Furthermore, implementing ISAAR(CPF) and EAC-CPF highlights the
need for a redefinition of historical (contextual) notes that were traditionally
associated with archival descriptions but can now be used as an independent
resource that can assist users in identifying and learning about the described
entity.
More broadly, to determine the essential EAC-CPF elements for core au-
thority records, it was necessary to answer the question What is an archival
authority record? and also to examine what potential users of archival au-
thority records want and need. The use of authority data in archives has
a wider scope than authority data in libraries: It is intended not only to
control headings but also to provide biographical and historical information
about the entities that created the archival records described in the archival
finding aids, as well as information about the relations between these en-
tities. However, archival authority records are not only management tools,
used by archivists and librarians, but they may also become reference tools
 An Approach to Implement EAC-CPF 107

for helping with the search. They may be used in a variety of ways. In
particular:

they can provide access to archival materials based on descriptions of

records creators;
they can help users better interpret the meaning and significance of the
archival materials; and
they can help users identify records creators by providing descriptions of
relationships between different entities.

The results of those discussions guided us in the definition of the rele-

vant ISAAR(CPF) elements, which were mapped to EAC-CPF elements and
attributes. As the concept of multiple identities was deemed not relevant
for the project, it was decided to create one single authoritative record
for each type of corporate body. To address the need for identification,
in addition to the mandatory <entityType> element, it was decided to
use the <nameEntry> element with a single <part> element and with
<authorizedForm> and <alternativeForm> elements to qualify the form
of name contained in <nameEntry>. As the forms of the name are always
in French, the <nameEntryParallel> element was considered out of scope
for the project. Regarding the description of the entity, most of the ele-
ments contained in <description> were selected: <existDates> (to record
the dates of formal establishment and dissolution of the described entity);
<places>/<place> (to indicate the generic places or jurisdictions of the
described entity such as administrative center of the department, seat of
the Court of Appeal); <legalStatus> (to indicate the official legal status of
the described entity such as penitentiary establishment or military juris-
diction); <function>/<function> (to list the significant functions held by
the entity, such as social assistance); <descriptiveNote> (to provide fuller
textual explanations); and <mandate> (to identify the sources of authority
for the functions of the entity). Persistent links to the Official Journal of
the French Republic are also provided through the generic linking element
<citation>, <structureOrGenealogy> (to describe the generic internal ad-
ministrative structure of the entity), and <biogHist> (to include significant
details about the generic administrative history of the entity in a series of
paragraphs <p>).
In addition, an institution, although represented at the national level, can
be established locally many years after it was formally created by a legal text,
act, or decree. So, the working group questioned the dates to be recorded
in the <existDates> element. As the objective of the working group was
to create generic records, it was decided to indicate as the start date the
date of the official text establishing the entity and to insert a comment in
the <biogHist> element such as the local establishment of this institution,
officially created in , may vary from one city to another one/from one
108 I. Chave and C. Sibille-de Grimouard

region to another. The archival institutions that will reuse the authority
records will have to adapt them to their own context.
Lastly, the real power of EAC-CPF comes in its <relations> section,
which provides the ability to associate the entity being described with other
entities or resources. These links help to create a web of contextual in-
formation that could potentially have a substantial benefit for researchers.
In our discussions on developing guidance for the use of relationships, we
addressed the following questions: What is the maximum number of relation-
ships that can be established with other entities? In what order should these
relationships be established? Should we focus on chronological rather than
on hierarchical relationships? As the creation of archival authority records is
time consuming, for economical and practical reasons it was decided that
the number of relationships should be limited to five. It was also decided
to start by establishing chronological relationships with immediate predeces-
sors/successors, then to continue with hierarchical relationships, and lastly to
end with associative relationships. Although ISAAR(CPF) values for character-
izing relationships are very generic, EAC-CPF offers a list of more specific val-
ues for the @cpfRelationType attribute of <cpfRelation>: temporal-earlier
or temporal-later for chronological relationships, hierarchical-parent or
hierarchical-child for hierarchical relationships, and associative for other
types of relationships. This list of values was considered satisfactory for the
project. It was also decided to establish links to the National Library of France
authority records by using the ARK identifier of the authority record from
the National Library of France as value for the @xlink:href attribute of the
<setComponent> element within <alternativeSet>.

First Results
In November 2013, the list of categories of entities for which authorized
forms of names have been established included 645 records creators (com-
mon name, acronym, standardized form of name, use examples). Though
a work in progress, the list has been made available on the website of
the Association of French Archivists, so that archivists can immediately get
guidance by consulting the already established forms of names. The list is
regularly updated with the new categories as soon as the working group
validates them.13
In the area of justice, 103 records creators have been identified and
86 authority records have been produced using ICA-AtoM and validated.
The others are being created. The authority records can be accessed in
read-only format directly through the module Authority Records of the
ICA-AtoM platform or from the workspace of the website of the Association
of French Archivists, which provides further documentation.14 The records
are displayed by chronological order of creation/updating or by alphabetical
order of the names of records creators (see Figure 2).
 An Approach to Implement EAC-CPF 109

FIGURE 2 Browse Results: User Has Clicked on Authority Records.

A full text search is possible. From the list of results, clicking on the name
of a creator redirects the user to the full authority record for this creator. In an
authority record view page, by selecting EAC under the button Export in
the context menu (see Figure 3) the authority record currently being viewed
is exported. Exported descriptions are displayed in the users web browser
window. To save the XML export file, the web browsers Save page as
functionality is used.
Three years after the projects launch, time has come to review the
achieved results and to evaluate how much success the participants have
had in creating records for local and regional bodies from those high-level
pattern records. As authority records are only provided for a few administra-
tive areas (Justice, Social Welfare, and Health), and as not all documentary
software used by local archival institutions include EAC-CPF import/export
features, it seems that the process of data re-use is still in the early stages and
that, at the moment, only archivists reuse those pattern records as manage-
ment tools. So far, the most significant result from this project is that it helps
to disseminate best practices in territorial archival institutions. For instance,
the Archives departementales de la Gironde at Bordeaux, in the process of
adopting the generic authority records and while enriching them with local
contextual information, decided to use additional EAC-CPF elements deemed
110 I. Chave and C. Sibille-de Grimouard

FIGURE 3 Display of an Authority Record.

as appropriate for local needs, such as <localDescription> to record struc-

tured index terms and create additional links to the Thesaurus for Indexing
Local Archives. Moreover, specifications were drafted to enable the publica-
tion and the search of EAC-CPF authority records on the Gironde Archives
en Ligne portal of the Archives departementales.15 The portal should include
a specific search form for records creators, including a full text search box,
and other search fields for the name entry, the type of entity, and keywords
(subject, functions, places). The authority records should be displayed from
a search result, or from the <bioghist> element of an EAD finding aid, or
from a link to an EAC-CPF record.
Another significant example of implementation of best practices is pro-
vided by the Archives departementales des Bouches-du-Rhone in the South
of France. A change of information system obliged this archival institution
to analyze and reevaluate its archival descriptions. As most of the data are
poorly structured or unstructured, the migration from the legacy system is
likely to be particularly problematic. Therefore, before the migration of the
information system, correction of legacy data is necessary to ensure interop-
erability and to implement EAD and EAC-CPF. An internal working group
was set up to standardize the forms of names and to describe records creators
according to ISAAR(CPF). The participation of the Archives departementales
 An Approach to Implement EAC-CPF 111

des Bouches-du-Rhone in the national working group proved to be most

useful for the institution. It enabled archivists to compare objectives, is-
sues, and specific experiences of their own archival institution with those
in other archival institutions, and it also helped to improve staff skills. In
parallel, it prompted the Archives departementales to launch another project
aiming at standardizing the forms of names of creators of personal private
papers and of corporate bodies of the Ancient Regime and of the French
Revolution.

PERSPECTIVES

As demonstrated above, this collaborative project encourages the progressive

adoption of EAC-CPF by French archival institutions. Nevertheless, although
archival authority records by their nature constitute connection points be-
tween different information resources, many French archivists still consider
EAC-CPF as a mere technical choice for encoding contextual information
rather than as an opportunity to link archival authority records to other re-
sources retrievable on the Internet. As a result, the working group is prepar-
ing a set of recommendations to encourage the professional community to
reuse the pattern records in a more semantic way.

Identifiers
The persistent, unique, and reliable identification of each resource is a major
issue to allow their quotability and thus contributing to their visibility. Today,
web developments, mainly around the web of data, lead us to consider
any type of object, entity, or even concept as a resource potentially accessi-
ble by humans as well as by machines. In this context, individual authority
records are likely to become web resources. A fundamental requirement for
exchanging authority records efficiently, for reliably aligning them with other
data, for using them as reference resources on the web, is the assignment
of persistent and, at the web scale, unique identifiers. Though the authority
records created within the framework of our project do not describe indi-
vidual institutions but categories of institutions, there is a strong rationale to
expose them as such in the web of data. Surely they serve as patterns, as
methodological guides for archival services that will then establish locally
separate records for the individual institutions of the same category. But if
actionable links by means of persistent identifiers are established between
them and each of the authority records for individual institution of the same
category, described locally in a distributed way in the respective archival
systems, these reference records are also likely to become federating points
for all the authority records of individual institutions. This would create the
112 I. Chave and C. Sibille-de Grimouard

basis for building a knowledge base on the French State administration or-
ganized in a hub and spoke way. For this, the records will need a unique
<recordId>. However, ICA-AtoM does not control identifiers of authority
records. According to the official documentation: Record a unique descrip-
tion identifier in accordance with local and/or national conventions. So,
for the moment only local identifiers are assigned to the generic author-
ity records as follows: a first mandatory segment includes the country code
(FR) and the official identifier (SIRET code16) of the Association of French
Archivists, a second segment includes the sequential number of the pattern.
If these records are to become citable and linkable web resources they will
need web identifiers. The archival institutions, which will export and reuse
generic authority records from ICA-AtoM, to create specific authority records
for each individual institution, will also need to implement web persistent
identifiers. For this purpose the Directorate of French Archives recommends
the use of ARK identifiers. Assigning ARK identifiers to these specific au-
thority records is necessary to federate them and to link them with other
contextual data.
In addition to the issue of implementation of web identifiers for records
as web resources, archival institutions have become aware of the need for
another level of identification: that of uniquely identifying the entities them-
selves (as opposed to the records that describe these entities). The archival
institutions have debated what identification code is the most appropriate to
adopt for the described entities. In France, the National Institute of Statis-
tics and Economic Studies (INSEE) issues SIRET and SIREN codes,17 which
are compliant with ISO 6523:1984Information Technologystructure for
the identification of organizations and organization parts. However, they are
managed only at the French level. These codes will not be interoperable
at an international level. The issues with the identification system proposed
by INSEE led the French Archives to consider the Register for the Interna-
tional Standard Name Identifier or ISNI.18 Advantages for French archival
institutions in following ISNI may include the following.

ISNI identifiers are international, unique codes, web compliant (resolv-

able as http URIs), centrally managed, and the central database is already
publicly available on the web.
The Archives Europe portal is also considering the implementation ISNIs
for identifying records creators.
Other countries (Finland for instance) have chosen ISNI as the identifier
for persons and corporate bodies for the purposes of interconnecting all
kind of cultural heritage resources.
France is strongly involved in the ISNI governance system as well as in the
quality control of the ISNI database (experts from the National Library of
France and from the British constitute the ISNI Quality Team); in addition,
 An Approach to Implement EAC-CPF 113

the National Library of France has just become an ISNI registration agency
on its own and plays a leading role on ISNI in France.19
The international agency ISNI-IA is very interested in taking into account
the needs of archives by doing a proof of concept about the identification
of entities managed by archival institutions.

Nevertheless, questions still remain about the principles we should adopt

for the assignment of this identifier. One of the issues to address is, for
example, that of the level of granularity of subdivisions of an institution
to which identifiers should be assigned. We need to assign identifiers to
subdivisions of organizations and agencies and manage the relationships
between the different hierarchical levels of the same organizational structure
whenever these subdivisions are individually described. Another issue is
that of relationships between these subdivisions and how can ISNI address
these relationships. In any case, it is of paramount importance to collaborate
directly with the ISNI International agency and the National Library of France
to appropriately address archives needs for ISNIs, so that this identifier can
be used efficiently as unique identifier for archival records creators in the
business applications used by archival institutions and electronic records
systems.
Another issue shared by the working group is the encoding of ISNI
codes. The <entityId> element with a @localType = ISNI appears as an
obvious solution, even if ISNI is assigned to the identity of the entity and not
to the entity itself.20 As identifiers are critical in the networking environment,
the way they are addressed in EAC-CPF would need to be reconsidered
to appropriately convey the semantics of each type of identifier (record
identifier vs. entity/identity identifier), and the technological management of
identifiers as URIs. Related to the latter, there is a concern for encoding in
EAC-CPF the displayable ISNI (e.g., ISNI 0000 0001 2117 8498) versus the
clickable ISNI as an http URI (e.g., http://isni.org/isni/0000000121340926).
In EAC-CPF the @localType and @xml:id attributes of <entityId> cannot
solve the issue in a satisfactory way. For the time being, within the framework
of our project, it is suggested that the @xlink:href attribute of <cpfRelation>
should contain this clickable ISNI, as it will only be a link to a record
containing an identifier number for an identity.

Combining Various Initiatives Related to Authorities

Each authority record may, through its area relationships, be related to other
governmental organizations and agencies at local or central level. For ex-
ample, relationships can be established between administrative courts at the
local level and the Council of State (in French: Conseil dEtat), which is
the higher level of administrative jurisdiction, and thus can also be found
114 I. Chave and C. Sibille-de Grimouard

in the information system of the National Archives. We discussed earlier the

potential of building a knowledge base on the French State administration
organized in a hub and spoke way by using the generic records created
within the framework of our project as federating access points. However,
currently there is no connection between the generic patterns produced for
departmental archives and the authority files of the National Archives. Nei-
ther are the generic patterns connected with the authority records created
for individual institutions by territorial archival institutions. And no links
exist even between the local authority records of departmental archives.
Initially the generic authority files thus developed were not intended to
serve as federating access points but rather as a methodological guide and
toolkit. But the perspective can evolve and they could be called to play that
role.
Consequently, all these projects should be interrelated, coordinated,
and federated to share, exchange, and interconnect information. Avoiding
the duplication of effort becomes a priority as well. As the authority data
produced by French archival institutions should be integrated into APEX
(which uses EAC-CPF as the standard for identifying and describing persons,
corporate bodies, and families), French archival institutions should also be
provided with consistent use of the same forms of name across descriptions
and with the possibility to identify the interrelations of different collections.
We discussed above the reasons for which the archives did not choose
to use the authority file of the National Library of France. However it is
recognized that a shared national authority file would have benefits for
users that would be provided with integrated access to distributed archival
resources, contextual data for not only the records of one creator, but other
related records, and biographical-historical resource.
Such issues are discussed at a high level via cross-domain initiatives
such as the HADOC project (harmonization of production of cultural data)
set up by the French Ministry of Culture and Communication aiming to
develop genuine cooperation across cultural institutions and create appro-
priate infrastructures. Indeed, this department-wide project aims to establish
a standardized framework for the production of cultural data, including the
definition of common data models and shared scientific and technical vo-
cabularies as well as authority files describing cultural actors.
The Social Networks and Archival Context (SNAC) project and the Na-
tional Archival Authorities Cooperative may also give the French archival pro-
fessional community some answers. The Directorate of French Archives was
solicited to participate in the SNAC project. EAD records from the national
database BORA (Base dOrientation et de Recherche dans les Archives), de-
scribing personal papers and photographic archives kept by French Archives,
were made available to SNAC.21 One of the possible outcomes is that the
derived EAC-CPF records could form the basis of a national archival authority
file and be included into the European portal archives.
 An Approach to Implement EAC-CPF 115

Lastly, efforts are underway to enhance the role of authority data within
the context of the European portals, which act as resources aggregators, such
as the Archives Portal Europe for archival institutions and The European
Library for libraries. Let us hope that we are not far from the day when
authority data produced as silos by French archival institutions and libraries
will be connected to each other within European gateways.

CONCLUSION

The initiative launched by the Directorate of French Archives and the Asso-
ciation of French Archivists is very useful for archivists by providing them
with generic and reusable authority records. But this is only a start. To build
a coherent strategy for archival institutions at the national level, the next
step is to develop recommendations about the reuse of the patterns and
standardized forms of names, especially as regards the permanent and reli-
able identifiers of the descriptive records and of the described entities both
for use in business applications used by archival institutions and electronic
records systems, and for use with Semantic Web technologies in a global
environment. A few simple actions are required to interrelate the existing
archival data with other data from other cultural heritage domains: identify
unequivocally the descriptive resources by means of dereferenced URIs and
include in the descriptions the greatest possible number of relevant links to
other information resources.
Bearing in mind the importance of authority data, French archival insti-
tutions and libraries already cooperate on standardization (participation in
the same experts groups on EAD and EAC-CPF formats, sharing of experi-
ence and expertise in the implementation of the AFNOR standards for build-
ing standardized access points). However, it is not enough. The authority
records produced for local authorities constitute an autonomous informa-
tion resource but also provide a powerful tool for interconnecting data. The
question is how to use these authority records in an efficient way. Several
approaches for cooperation are being discussed: setting up a cooperative
program at the national level to reduce costs for information generation and
provide integrated access to resources related to the same entity, sharing
a common policy as concerns identifiers, and taking advantage of techno-
logical evolutions (evolving from a record based system towards embracing
distributed Linked Open Data principles to connect users with the contextual
resources they seek).

NOTES

1. Stefano Vitali, International Archival Descriptive Standards: Origins, Developments and Per-
spectives 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
116 I. Chave and C. Sibille-de Grimouard

2. In the administrative division of France, the department (French: departement) 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 Grimouard (Service interministeriel des archives de France [Directorate of French
Archives]) and is composed of Agnes dAngio-Barros (Ministere de lEconomie, des Finances et
de lindustrie [Ministry of the Economy, Finance and Industry]), Florence Clavaud (Archives na-
tionales), Pascale Etiennette (Archives departementales de Meurthe-et-Moselle), Pascal Geneste (Archives
departementales de la Gironde), Francois Giustiniani (Archives departementales des Hautes-Pyrenees),
Agnes Goudail (Archives departementales de la Loire), Benedicte Grailles-Marcilloux (Universite
dAngers), Delphine Jamet (Archives departementales de la Gironde), Antoine Meissonnier (Service in-
terministeriel des Archives de France), Alice Motte (Service interministeriel des archives de France),
Vincent Mollet (Archives departementales du Gard), Laurent Pons (Archives departementales du Tarn),
Melanie Rebours (Service interministeriel des Archives de France), Aude Rlly (Service interministeriel
des Archives de France), Helose Rouge (Archives departementales des Bouches-du-Rhone), Sebastien
Studer (Service interministeriel des Archives de France), and Anne-Isabelle Vidal (Archives nationales
doutre-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 (dec. 1996): Catalogue dauteurs et danonymes: forme et structure des vedettes
de collectivites-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 AtoMs 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 com-
pany 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
 An Approach to Implement EAC-CPF 117

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 documentationInternational 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).
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