Part 3: Authorities

A.1 Personal and Corporate Name Authority

A.1.1.1 Discussion

The Personal and Corporate Name Authority contains names and other information about artists, architects, studios, architectural firms, and others responsible for the design and production of cultural works. This authority file will also contain information about patrons, repositories, and other persons or corporate bodies related to particular works. This authority file includes records for individuals (persons) and for organizations or any other two or more persons working together (corporate bodies).

Person

Persons include individuals whose biographies are well known, such as Rembrandt van Rijn (Dutch painter and printmaker, 1606-1669), and creators with identified oeuvres but whose names are unknown and whose biography is estimated or surmised, such as Master of Alkmaar (North Netherlandish painter, active ca. 1490-ca. 1510). The name authority is limited to real, historical persons. Fictional persons are recorded in the Subject Authority.

Corporate Body

A corporate body may be a legally incorporated entity, such as a modern architectural firm, but does not necessarily have to be legally incorporated; for example, a 16th-century sculptors' studio or family of artists may be recorded as a corporate body. Corporate bodies should be organized, identifiable groups of individuals working together in a particular place and within a defined period of time. A workshop may be included in the Personal and Corporate Name Authority if the workshop itself is a distinct group of individuals, collectively responsible for fostering the creation of art (for example, the 13th-century group of French illuminators, Soissons Atelier). Museums and most other repositories are also corporate bodies. Certain events, such as conferences, are typically treated as corporate bodies and recorded in this authority (for historical events, see A4: Subject Authority).¹

Persons and Corporate Bodies That Are Not Creators

The discussion in this chapter focuses on creators and repositories. However, institutions may use a single authority file to record all nonfictional persons and corporate bodies associated with the work; for example, the Personal and Corporate Name Authority should include records for art academies, merchants, rulers, manufacturers, patrons, and any person depicted in works.

Unknown Creators

Note that a designation such as workshop of Raphael is outside the scope of this kind of authority file. In this example, the concept workshop of is considered a qualifier of the attribution to Raphael (whose record would be in this authority file). This qualifier belongs in the Work Record. Qualifiers may be used in Work Records when the identity of a creator is unknown but he has worked closely with a known creator; in such cases, it is common to associate the work with the name of a known creator whose oeuvre is stylistically similar or otherwise related to the work at hand. In such cases, you should link the Work Record to the Authority Record for the known creator, but the known creator's name needs to be qualified in the Work Record with a phrase such as workshop of, follower of, attributed to, or studio of. For definitions of these qualifiers and further discussion of this issue, see Chapter 2: Creator Information: Suggested Terminology for Qualifier and Extent.

Other examples of unknown creators include unidentified artistic personalities with unestablished oeuvres, referred to by designations such as Florentine or unknown 16th-century Florentine, and may be included in this authority.

In this approach, separate Authority Records are maintained for cultures and ethnic groups in the Personal and Corporate Name Authority that can be linked to all Work Records for which this heading applies. In such cases, the generic identification does not refer to one identified, if anonymous, individual; but instead the same heading refers to any number of anonymous, unidentified artistic personalities linked in various Work Records. The heading may or may not include the word unknown, provided that it is done consistently.

Another approach for cases in which the identity of a hand and its oeuvre is not established is to devise a generic identification for display in the Work Record by concatenating terms from the culture element (see Chapter 4: Stylistic, Cultural, and Chronological Information), with or without a word such as unknown (but be consistent).

About Repositories

The location of a work (recorded in the Work Record) may be a repository. Administrative repositories (for example, museums and other institutions) should be controlled by corporate body authority records in this authority file; the record for the museum should in turn contain the geographic location of the repository, ideally through a link to the Geographic Place Authority. Other locations for works are buildings (not administrative repositories) and geographic locations; see Chapter 5: Location and Geography, A2: Geographic Place Authority, and A4: Subject Authority.

For repositories and other corporate bodies in this authority file, some cataloging institutions may also need to record the buildings that house the corporate bodies as architectural works in their own right. Both the corporate body and the building as a work may have the same name, but they are separate entities. Records for these buildings as architectural works should be separately recorded with other Work Records, even if this requires some redundancy. For example, the National Gallery of Art in Washington is a corporate body that has a board of directors and other related people; it acquires art works and cares for the objects under its protection. In a hierarchical data model, its parts would be the departments in the National Gallery, such as the Department of Prints, Drawings, and Photographs, Index of American Design, and so forth. The corporate body would likely still exist if the art collection were moved to new buildings. The buildings that currently house this corporate body and its art works are collectively also called the National Gallery of Art, but that work of architecture has different characteristics from the institution and is recorded in different database fields; it therefore should be recorded as a work in its own right, if such information is pertinent for the cataloging institution. As a work of architecture, the National Gallery has building materials, dates of design and construction, styles, and creators (the architects John Russell Pope and I. M. Pei). In a hierarchical data model, its parts would be the West Building and the East Building. Of course, in such a data structure, the record for the National Gallery of Art as an institution would be linked to the record for the National Gallery of Art as an architectural work.

Ambiguity and Uncertainty

When creating an Authority Record, if information about a person or corporate body is ambiguous or uncertain, the cataloger should state only what is known. When information is uncertain, it may still be recorded, but with an indication of uncertainty or approximation--such as ca. or probably--in the Note or Display Biography fields. Important information in these free-text fields should be indexed in controlled fields. Rules should be in place to ensure consistency in recording uncertain data. If biographical information is uncertain or ambiguous, this should be indicated in the Display Biography. Such uncertainty may require that the multiple possibilities be indexed in the controlled fields. For example, if it is uncertain whether a creator was Flemish or French, this should be explained in the Display Biography (for example, Flemish or French painter, 14th century), and both nationalities should be indexed in the controlled fields for retrieval. If a cataloger is uncertain whether one artist is the same person as another person with a similar name, rather than mistakenly linking the two names in one record, separate records should be made for each person until the issue is resolved through additional research.

Organization of the Data

The creator's names, nationality, life roles, and life dates are critical access points and are required.

Some fields in this authority file are intended for display. Others should be formatted and used for indexing and retrieval (see Display and Indexing below). The only required free-text field discussed in this section is the Display Biography for the creator. It is assumed that key data values must be separately formatted and linked to controlled vocabularies to allow for retrieval, which this manual refers to as indexing.

Ideally, this authority file should be in the form of a thesaurus to allow for equivalence, associative, and occasionally whole-part relationships (see Controlled Vocabulary: Thesaurus).

Although names and biographical information about creators are stored in this authority file separately from the Work Records, in retrieval such information should be accessible in combination with fields in the Work Record. For example, a user may request tapestries (work type in the Work Records) by Italian artists (artist nationality in the Personal and Corporate Name Authority Records). The relationships between the Work Record and the authority file should also permit, when referring to the creator in the Work Record, the preferred name of the creator and a Display Biography-generally the nationality, life roles, and life dates-to be displayed through a link to an Authority Record.

Display Biography, Birth Date, Death Date, Note, and Gender should not be repeatable elements. All other elements should be repeatable. One of the names should be flagged as preferred. A brief discussion of the elements or fields recommended for this authority file is included in this section. For further discussion of the relationships between this authority file and the Work Record, see Chapter 2: Creator Information. For further discussion of this authority file and additional fields, see Categories for the Description of Works of Art: Creator Identification. For a fuller set of editorial rules for personal and corporate body names, see the Union List of Artist Names Editorial Guidelines.²

Recommended Elements

A list of the elements discussed in this chapter appears below. Required elements are noted. Display may be a free-text field or concatenated from controlled fields. Note that the same elements are used for persons and corporate bodies.

Notes

1. Included in the Personal and Corporate Name Authority are events that are formally convened, directed toward a common goal, capable of being reconvened, and have formal names, locations, dates, and durations that can be determined in advance of the event (for example, Society of Architectural Historians Annual Meeting). See the Library of Congress Name Authority file and AACR for formulating names for such events. See also PCC Task Group on Name Versus Subject Authorities Final Report, at http://www.loc.gov/catdir/pcc/archive/divworld.html
2. The Union List of Artist Names Editorial Guidelines can be found at http://www.getty.edu/research/conducting_research/vocabularies/
   editorial_guidelines.html.