My concern is that on our website, we have the ability to search names that have been indexed from records, such as death certificates, which is a different thing than an EAC record. I'm trying to distinguish between the two for people who are doing advanced faceted searching.

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.


>>> "Fox, Michael" <[log in to unmask]> 5/25/11 12:16 PM >>>
Why not just say "name"?  The reader can tell at a glance what type of  
name it is, should they care to make such a distinction.

Conveying the entity's role- agent, author, whatever is anithe  
matter   Names exist in the EAC context independantly of particular  
roles which is a concept that only makes sense in the context of the  
entity's relationship to a particular function or body of records   Of  
course in EAD, all the name elements have a ROLE attribute to specify  
the relationship between the named entity and the records.

Michael Fox



On May 24, 2011, at 11:49 PM, "BRIAN TINGLE" <[log in to unmask] 
 > wrote:

> In an EAC prototype I'm developing an interface for [1]  as part of  
> a research project I tried to keep the labels matching the EAC  
> terminology, giving the benefit of the doubt to the work that was  
> done to come up with those terms by the schema developers until it  
> proves confusing for users.
>
> Using that logic, I would go with "identity" or maybe "name entry"  
> after the eac element names -- but I din't actually use those words  
> as labels for anything in the SNAC prototype design.  I do have  
> "authorized form of name" show when you hold the mouse over the name  
> on the identity record page; and in the browse I call them "Names",  
> "Person Names", "Corporate Body Names", and "Family Names" depending  
> on the entityType limit.
>
> [1] http://socialarchive.iath.virginia.edu/xtf/search 
>
>
> On May 24, 2011, at 5:34 PM, Elizabeth Perkes wrote:
>
>> 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.