[Archivesspace_Users_Group] Geographic creators

[Olivia S Solis]

Hi all,

I am wondering how some of you all may have handled documenting the
creators of collections in ArchivesSpace when the creator is a geographic
location, as in e.g. Austin (Tex.) — meaning its government.

Some the standards I am looking at:
RDA
In its chapter on places, "The names of places are commonly used in the
following ways: as the names of governments and communities that are not
governments."

Chapter on corporate bodies: "The conventional name of a government is the
name of the area over which the government exercises jurisdiction" and then
it refers you to the chapter on places.

DACS
Defines the creator as "identifies the corporate bodies, persons, and
families associated with the creation, assembly, accumulation..."

Our particular conundrum is that we export and publish EAD to a consortium
that is going to begin imposing mandatory creators, and many of ours are
technically geographic. However, perhaps some of you have also grappled
with this hybrid geographic/corporate sense of a place term. Maybe some of
you would also like to identify a creator when it is a government that
presides over a geographic area because you would like Austin to be a nice
clickable, identifiable creator *and* geographic subject.

A dodge I have tried to recommend to processors is to identify the creator
as the specific agency of the term that may have created the collection,
e.g. Austin (Tex.). City Council. But sometimes we don't know the division
that created the records and sometimes the broader city of Austin is really
the creator. I certainly don't want to create two Austins, one agent and
one geographic subject, as it would violate cataloging standards, wreak
havoc on our taxonomy management, and create a clickable wild west in
ASpace.

Apologies if there is an obvious solution to this that I do not know about.

Thanks,
Olivia

-- 
Olivia Solis, MSIS
Metadata Coordinator
Dolph Briscoe Center for American History
The University of Texas at Austin
2300 Red River St. Stop D1100
Austin TX, 78712-1426
(512) 232-8013
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