Part 3: Authorities

A.2 Geographic Place Authority

A.2.1.1 Discussion

The Geographic Place Authority contains information about geographic places important to the cultural works and creators. The places noted in this authority include both physical features and administrative entities.

Physical Features

Physical features include entities that are part of the natural physical condition of the planet, such as continents, rivers, and mountains. Surface features as well as underground and submarine features may be included, as necessary. Former features, such as submerged islands and lost coastlines, may also be included, as necessary.

Places on planet Earth, other planets, and other celestial bodies may be included. Mythological, legendary, and imaginary places (for example, Atlantis, Garden of Eden, Wonderland) should be recorded in the Subject Authority.

Administrative Geographic Entities

Administrative geographic entities include man-made or cultural entities typically defined by political and administrative boundaries, such as empires, nations, states, districts, townships, and cities. Entities set up by ecclesiastical or tribal governing bodies may also be included, as necessary. Both current and historical places, such as deserted settlements and former nations, may be included. Most records in this authority will probably represent nations and the administrative subdivisions and inhabited places belonging to them.

The Geographic Place Authority may contain names for archaeological sites (for example, trench A66 (Flag Fen, Essex, England)) and street addresses. This authority may also include what are called general regions, that is, recognized, named areas with undefined, controversial, or ambiguous borders. An example is the Middle East, which refers to an area in southwestern Asia and northeastern Africa that has no defined borders and is variously interpreted to mean different sets of nations.

Terminology for generic cultural and political groups is outside the scope of this authority file, and should generally be recorded in the Concept Authority. However, the political state of a cultural or political group, and the territory within its boundaries, are within the geographic authority scope. For example, the Ottoman Turks are outside the scope, though the Ottoman Empire could be included.

Built works are generally outside of the scope and should be recorded as works or in the Subject Authority, depending on local practice (see A4: Subject Authority).

Geographic Places and Locations of Works

Geographic place terms are used primarily in describing the location of works. In the case of built works (such as the Arch of Constantine), monumental sculpture, and certain other works, this may be a city, such as Rome (Italy), or other geographic place controlled by the authority file. For other works, such as a painting, the locations are often administrative repositories, such as museums and other institutions, which should be controlled by corporate name authority records, which in turn would have a location field in which the link to the geographic place would be maintained (see Chapter 5: Location and Geography and A1: Personal and Corporate Name Authority).

When cataloging a work located in a building such as a church, for example, Santa Croce (Florence, Italy), or another building that does not house a museum, building names should generally be recorded in the Subject authority. These records may be linked to the location fields of works as necessary (see A4: Subject Authority and Chapter 5: Location and Geography).¹ Alternatively, buildings may be cataloged as built works in their own Work Records, and linked to other Work Records as necessary.²

Ambiguity and Uncertainty

When creating an authority record, the cataloger should state only what is known about a geographic place. 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 field. Important information in the Note field should be indexed in controlled fields. Rules should be in place to ensure consistency in recording uncertain data. For example, if it is uncertain whether an ancient town has a modern equivalent, rather than mistakenly linking the ancient name with the modern town in the same record, a separate record should be made for the ancient town until such time that the question is resolved through additional research.

Organization of the Data

The various names that might apply to a place are critical access points and therefore required. The place type, which describes the kind of place represented (nation, city, or mountain, for example), is also required.

Ideally, this authority should be in the form of a thesaurus to allow for equivalence, associative, and whole-part relationships (see Part 1: Authority Files and Controlled Vocabulary: Thesaurus). An indication of the broader context of the place is also required (for example, the broader context for Ethiopia is Africa). Having a hierarchical structure that allows for the place name to be displayed within its broader contexts, either indented in vertical displays or concatenated in horizontal strings, is recommended.

Some fields in this authority may be used for display. Others are intended for retrieval. If the horizontal parent string is constructed by hand (in the absence of a hierarchical structure, from which it could be concatenated), broader context display would be a display field. In the absence of a hierarchical structure, a broader context display field could be constructed by hand (for example, Dunhuang, Gansu, China). If date fields are included, they may include fields intended for display and others for indexing and retrieval.

Coordinates should be recorded in appropriate sets (such as latitude and longitude), but the sets need not be repeatable. The note need not be repeatable. All other elements should be repeatable. The hierarchical structure should allow polyhierarchical relationships (a place may have two broader contexts, for example). 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 this authority file and additional fields, see the Categories for the Description of Works of Art: Place/Location Identification authority. For a fuller set of editorial rules for geographic names, see the Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names Editorial Guidelines.³ For further discussion of the relationships between this authority and the Work Record, see Chapter 5: Location and Geography.

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.

Notes

1. Given that built works may be both subjects and locations of works, it is more efficient to store the information in only one authority rather then in both the Subject and Geographic Place Authorities. The built work may in addition be stored as a work in its own right in a Work Record, which will typically have a full set of fields to record the architect, date of construction, materials, dimensions, and other information that cannot typically be captured in a subject Authority Record. For institutions whose emphasis is on cataloging architectural drawings, a separate Architectural Subject Authority may be created, which would contain the same fields as a Work Record for built works. See the full description of this authority in the Guide to the Description of Architectural Drawings.
2. In the library community, there have recently been discussions regarding whether to treat building names as corporate body names or as subject headings. Currently, in some records, a heading such as Empire State Building is given in the USMARC 110 field, which is for corporate bodies. But at the same time the Library of Congress lists Empire State Building in its subject authority file, not its name authority file.
3. The Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names Editorial Guidelines can be found at http://www.getty.edu/research/conducting_research/vocabularies/
   editiorial_guidelines.html