DOCUMENTARY SERVICES

Standardisation of Archival Authorities

CIDA, within the Sub-Directorate General of National Archives, participates as a standardising agency in the process of archival standardisation. This strategic approach implies the control of the authority records related to the preserved documents in the National Archives.

In a database like PARES, that gathers several millions of descriptive units, it is essential to upgrade the management of access points and authorities records in order to achieve an optimal retrieval of archival information and the exchange of information with other national and international sites. For this reason, the work of controlling archival authorities has become the authentic neural network of description in the National Archives, dependent on Culture, based on the use of open data and multilingualism.

This new line of action started in 2008 with the creation of an Indexing Working Group by the Sub-Directorate General of National Archives. The result of the Group's work was the publication of the first version of the Regulation for the development of standard access points (NPA) in 2010.

The working software tool for the monitoring of archival standardisation is the PARES Authorities Module , and it is at the disposal of any user in the new search interface of PARES 2.0. The categories that can be found in the Module are based on the entity types set by the Conceptual Model of the Commission of Spanish Regulations for Archival Description (CNEDA) and are as follows:

• Non-documentary entities of agent type (persons, institutions, families)

• Thesaurized non-documentary entities (places, concepts, objects, events, functions, rules)