Is there a consensus yet about how to label a corporate, personal, or family name in a way that makes sense to both archivists and users? Since we are a government office collecting government records, traditionally we just call these names "agencies." The EAC standard uses the term "agent" and "entity." To me, "agent" sounds like somebody from the CIA or FBI. We've relabeled fields in our database to call them "entities" since if we add all the contextual information possible, we very well could have people or even a First Family recorded in this file. I don't know if a researcher would know what an "entity" was if asked to do a keyword search on such a field, although search results that display "creating entity" might help. For them, the term "record creator" or "author" might be best understood, but EAC allows for entry of people or corporations that did not directly create the records, even though they may provide some context into that creation. Using "Corporate, Personal, or Family name" usually takes up too much space on screen for archival data entry, and researchers might confuse that search box with the name of the person they are researching, instead of the entity that created the records. Using just "name" is even more generic. What would you label these things?
Elizabeth Perkes
Electronic Records Archivist
Utah State Archives
346 South Rio Grande
Salt Lake City, UT 84101-1106
801-531-3852
[log in to unmask]
The State Archives' hours of operation are Monday-Thursday, 7:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. and closed on Friday. Please make a note of these hours.
|