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 Biographical/Corporate Descriptive Note
Life Role(s)
Locus/Location*
Descriptive Date of Existence
Earliest Date of Existence
Latest Date of Existence
Life Role(s)
Roles can be specific to a context (the part a person played in
the making of an item) or more generalized (the major life role of an
individual, such as author). Specific roles of people and
corporate bodies are recorded in the appropriate contexts (Maker or Administrative Origin in an item entry). General, or life, roles are part of a
person's biography or a corporate body's history and belong,
therefore, to People/Corporate Bodies authority records.
Examples:
NAME:
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Urban VIII
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LIFE ROLE(S):
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pope
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NAME:
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Parker & Unwin
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LIFE ROLE(S):
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architectural firm
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Relationships to Other Entities
Relationships of people and corporate bodies to items, works, and
other people and corporate bodies can be expressed by naming the
entity involved, and then characterizing the nature of the
relationship or role. [1]
Examples:
NAME:
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Francisco de Hollanda
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ROLE (BROAD):
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maker
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Role (Narrow):
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compiler
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Related Group/Item:
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Madrid, El Escorial, Real Monasterio de San Lorenzo,
Biblioteca, A/e ij 6
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Name:
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Latrobe, Benjamin Henry
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Related Role:
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architect
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Related Subject/Built Work:
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Decatur House
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Name:
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Hearst, William Randolph
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Related Role:
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client
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Related Subject/Built Work:
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La Casa Grande
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Name:
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Howe, John H.
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Role (Broad):
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maker
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Role (Narrow):
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draftsman
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Related Corporate Body:
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Frank Lloyd Wright
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Roles can be expressed in varying degrees of specificity, from
broader to narrower terms. For example, under architects, the
AAT lists several specialties, such as landscape
architects and naval architects. These narrower terms
reflect the subject of the architect's design work, but other narrow
terms reflect different considerations, such as the architect's position within a project (supervising
architects ) or the employer (government architects ), for
example. Such concepts are often covered, however, in other
categories, and therefore may not need to be described within the
Life Role(s) category. When there is a need to
qualify or give a narrower term for a life role, it is possible to
indicate it in the Descriptive Name category under People/Corporate Bodies, as shown in Groups/Items.
Some key biographical and corporate information is necessary for
retrieval of architectural documents. For example, the habitual
working places of makers (Locus of activity) are
key to the retrieval of items of a given geographic school. Therefore
many of these categories are considered core in group and item
cataloguing.
The more central the person or corporate body is to the making of
the group or item being catalogued, the more important it is to
provide a biographical/corporate history. Generally, makers should
always have authority entries.
The illustration below represents a hypothetical data entry screen. The
smaller boxes within indicate individual fields, or groups of fields,
that can repeat within the screen, and/or which reside in an
authority file and appear for purpose of data entry and display. In
this example, the fields for name and role repeat in order to allow
for the inclusion of alternative (non-preferred) forms of names and
to permit more than one life role. The locus/location (one or more)
could be recorded here but held in the Geographic Locations file. The
screen does not, however, display any linkages made to the
Groups/Items, Subjects/Built Works, and Bibliographic Sources
authority records.
Category:
Biographical/Corporate
Descriptive Note
Definition:
A discursive note about a person's life or the history of a corporate
body.
Discussion:
This category provides biographical information or corporate history,
when available, for any person or corporate body recorded in an
authority file. It can therefore enhance the researcher's ability to
find related material and to understand the context of the documents
retrieved. Group-level cataloguing may emphasize administrative
history in order to clarify the reasons for the generation of
documents and their use by related agencies.
It is important to record any core information contained in the
descriptive note in the appropriate categories.
Example of a Biographical Descriptive Note:
[for Henry Flitcroft, England, 1697\x971769]
Son of a gardener to King William III, Flitcroft was
apprenticed to a joiner in 1711. By 1720 he had become draughtsman
and architectural assistant to Lord Burlington. For Burlington he
surveyed the site of the new dormitory at Westminster School, 1720,
supervised the works at Tottenham Park, Wiltshire, c.1721, and
prepared the drawings published by William Kent as the Designs of
Inigo Jones, 1727. Burlington procured him a clerkship of the
works at Whitehall, Westminster and St James, and he remained an
important figure in the Office of Works until his death. His
architectural works, conservatively in the Palladian mould, include
the church of St Giles-in-the-Fields, London, 1731\x9734; work at
Wentworth Woodhouse, Yorkshire, ca. 1735\x9770; St Olave's church,
Southwark, 1738\x9739 (demolished, 1926), and the rebuilding of
Woburn Abbey, Bedfordshire, 1747\x9761.
Example of a Corporate Descriptive Note:
The Public Buildings Service was created in 1949 as part of the
General Services Administration. An important direct predecessor of
the Public Buildings Service was the Office of the Supervising
Architect of the Treasury Department. The Office of the Supervising
Architect was established in 1853 as part of the Construction Branch
in the Treasury Department. This branch had responsibility for
directing the building activities of the Federal government outside
the District of Columbia. The major duties of the Construction Branch
were to select and purchase building sites, make plans and estimates
for buildings, supervise construction, and preserve related records
and models. Starting in 1865, the Supervising Architect acted as the
head of the branch. At an unknown date, the Construction Branch
became known as the Office of the Supervising Architect, a unit of
the Secretary's Office. In 1933, an Executive Order transferred the
Office of the Supervising Architect to the Procurement Division. The
Public Works Branch of this division took over the responsibilities
of the former Office of the Supervising Architect. The Public Works
Branch later became the Public Buildings Branch. In 1939, the
functions of the Public Buildings Branch of the Treasury were
transferred to the Public Buildings Administration (PBA) which had
been established as part of the Federal Works Agency. By 1949, the
PBA was abolished and its functions transferred to the Public
Buildings Service of the General Services Administration.
Implementation:
descriptive
optional
single occurrence
Category:
Life
Role(s)
Definition:
The major professional and/or social roles played by a person in
his/her lifetime or the major roles and activities of a corporate
body. These are often broader and more inclusive than the roles
played in the context of a given group/item, subject, or built work.
In the case of entries for groups or items, the role is defined as
the specific action of the person or corporate body within the
context of the group or item. For example, a person may be the
draftsman for a drawing, although his life profession may be
architect.
Discussion:
The recording of general occupations and social roles greatly
enhances the ability to retrieve information in innovative ways. For
instance, to be able to find all items related to academies
would save researchers the time-consuming task of doing so by
querying by all the names of such corporate bodies. To be able to
sort records for architectural subjects by the professions or
occupations of clients could yield, for example, new information
about patterns of patronage.
This category is different from roles in other contexts,
since it is an overall lifetime role, not the role taken in
relation to a given item or Subject/Built work. For example,
in an entry for a drawing by Frank Lloyd Wright representing
the Guggenheim Museum (the subject/built work), the
client (Related Role under Related People/Corporate
Bodies) would be the Guggenheim Museum (as a corporate
body). However, in the corporate body authority record for
the same institution, the larger corporate role (Life Role)
would be museum.
Given the wide scope of architectural practice, a very broad range
of possible relationships can be recorded in connection with groups
and items. The scope may be imagined as a set of concentric circles,
with the maker and administrative origin in the center. Certain
related persons and corporate bodies may be more important than
others. For example, it may be important to record architects,
designers, authors, bishops, cardinals, popes, developers, engineers,
planners, surveyors, doges, dukes, kings, regents, antiquaries,
collectors, donors, patrons, preservationists. Other people, such
as craftsmen, may be identified by documents concerning built works,
but recording them may be of little retrieval value to most
researchers. Examples of low-priority roles are glaziers,
inlayers, wood-carvers, brickmakers, blasters, carpenters, slingers,
masons, plasterers, scaffolders.
While this is not a core category, repositories are urged to
supplement authority records with this information when it is
available.
Terminology:
Appropriate terms may be found in the AAT' s People (HG) and
Organizations (HN) hierarchies. Other hierarchies may contain terms
that would seem to be appropriate, but caution should be taken. For
example, for building types that are based on corporate roles or
institutional function, such terms are in the Single Built Works
(RK). [2] This is true for museums,
libraries, archives, churches, stores, banks, etc. According to the
AAT, it is acceptable to use such building types as terms for
corporate bodies. Cataloguers and researchers will need to be aware
of the different meanings assigned to terms, however. To record a
Subject/Built work as a church is quite different from
recording a corporate body as a church. For example, a
researcher may wish to retrieve all instances of patronage by
churches during a certain date range and in a given geographic
region. This question cannot be answered by retrieving
churches in the area of Subjects/Built
Works because the result would simply be representations of
churches as single built works by function. It would not address the
structures which were designed and/or built for churches as
corporate bodies, such as campsites, diocesan headquarters, newspaper
plants, etc.
Implementation:
access point
terminology-controlled
optional
repeatable
Category:
Locus/Location*
Definition:
People : The locus or loci of activity, or habitual working
place(s) of the individual. A locus may be a country, a region, or a
specific locale.
Corporate bodies : The geographic place where a firm or
institution is or was located or where it was habitually active.
Discussion:
This category records locus of activity or location of a person or
corporate body, rather than a place of execution of a group or item.
The habitual working locale of a maker often influences his or her
approach to design, style, and problem-solving, and is therefore
deemed more significant for retrieval than where an item was made,
since draftsmen have a tendency to travel widely, and the place of
execution may not be ascertainable anyway.
An additional function of this category is to help to qualify the
identity of the person or corporate body in question. Because names
are not in themselves unique, sometimes the only way to distinguish
one entity from another is to provide Locus/Location and Dates of Existence
as additional qualifying information.
If a person or corporate body had more than one locus/location or
if the exact locus or location, e.g., city, is unknown, the
information can be generalized up to the level of country (e.g., for
Montreal, Ottawa, and Vancouver one can generalize to
Canada). If more than one country is pertinent, it is usually
sufficient to provide principal loci.
This is a core category for originators and makers of groups and
items because of the need for consistent retrieval of individuals and
corporate bodies by their habitual workplaces or locations, e.g.,
all items by Piedmontese draftsmen,or all repositories of
architectural documents in Portugal.
Example:
[The principal city of practice for the following architect is
unknown]
Name:
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Young, Witherden
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Locus:
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England
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Implementation:
access point
authority-controlled: Geographic Locations
optional
hierarchical
repeatable
Category:
Descriptive
Date of Existence
Definition:
A natural-language expression of the dates of existence for the
person or corporate body. This is a span of time, beginning with
birth or formation, and ending with death or cessation of
association. In many instances, exact dates are not known.
DESCRIPTIVE DATE OF EXISTENCE allows for approximations,
qualifications, and other conventional expressions.
Discussion:
This category retains nuances and expressions of doubt, while the
following two categories function as retrieval dates. See Date of
Execution, under Groups/Items, for conventions for exact or certain dates, as well
as uncertain dates.
Typical uncertain dates for people may be expressed in a number of
forms:
Examples:
last quarter 12th century\x97probably mid-1230s [for the
life dates of Villard de Honnecourt]
1444?\x9711.IV.1514 [life dates for Donato Bramante,
whose birthdate is surmised from Vasari's statement that Bramante was
70 years old at his death]
born 26.IV.1917 [for the living architect Ieoh Ming
Pei]
died 1863 [for a client whose birth date is
unknown]
It is sometimes important to list other dates associated with a
person's life, as with the reign of a pope or monarch. These may be
recorded in this category, though only birth and death dates are
access points, e.g.,
Descriptive Date of Existence:
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23.IX.63 B.C.\x9719.VIII.14; reigned as emperor 27
B.C.\x9714
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The following is a descriptive date for a corporate body:
26.V.1917\x97I.1923 [for the administrative origin and
dissolution of a corporate body, the American Expeditionary Forces,
War Department, United States Government]
Descriptive dates for corporate bodies may clarify the meaning of
the dates given, for example: founded 1904\x97dissolved 1936
[for the Toronto-based architectural firm, Wickson and
Gregg].
All descriptive dates may be further discussed in the Biographical/Corporate History Descriptive Note, e.g.,
Descriptive Date of Existence:
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active by 1880\x97present
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Descriptive Note:
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This company was active by at least 1880, when the
sons of Elisha Graves Otis, Charles and Norton, are
documented to have been active in a company based on their
father's promotion of his steam engine-driven "safety
hoist.''
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Implementation:
descriptive
optional
single occurrence
Category:
Earliest
Date of Existence
Definition:
The earliest possible date of birth or beginning of existence for a
person or corporate body.
Discussion:
When only the terminal date (of death or cessation of a firm) is
known, the beginning date (of birth or beginning of activity) must be
estimated. This enhances reliable retrieval by date spans.
Dates are treated uniformly throughout the Guide in order
to facilitate retrieval. For guidelines see Earliest Date in Groups/Items.
Implementation:
access point
format-controlled: numeric
optional
single occurrence
Category:Latest
Date of Existence
Definition:
The latest possible date by which a person died or by which a
corporate body ceased to exist.
Discussion:
Dates are treated uniformly throughout the Guide in order to
facilitate consistency of retrieval. For guidelines see Latest Date in Groups/Items.
It should be possible to retrieve records for living people and existing corporate
bodies. Some mechanism to allow such retrieval should therefore
be in place, such as specifying 9999 as Latest Date.
Implementation:
access point
format-controlled: numeric
optional
single occurrence
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