Towards the Development of a National Archival Authority File in France: An Approach to Implement EAC-CPF

Abstract

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 institutions for their needs to establish descriptions for individual records creators. To build a coherent strategy for the archives at the national 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.