ICAISAAR(CPF) is the international standard for creating authority records that describe the entities — corporate bodies, persons, and families — responsible for creating, accumulating, or maintaining archival materials. Published by the International Council on Archives (ICA), it provides a structured framework for authority control in archival contexts.
Background
The need for standardized archival authority records emerged in the 1990s as archives sought to improve access to their holdings through consistent name forms and contextual descriptions of record creators. The ICA's Committee on Descriptive Standards developed ISAAR(CPF) to complement ISAD(G), the General International Standard Archival Description, which focuses on the records themselves rather than their creators.
The first edition of ISAAR(CPF) was adopted in 1996. A substantially revised second edition was published in 2003, expanding the standard's scope and refining its structure based on implementation experience from the archival community worldwide.
Purpose & Scope
ISAAR(CPF) addresses a specific challenge in archival description: providing consistent, rich, and shareable descriptions of the agents responsible for creating archives. While ISAD(G) describes what is in an archive, ISAAR(CPF) describes who created it and why. This separation enables authority records to be shared across repositories, linked to multiple archival descriptions, and maintained independently of any single collection.
The standard is applicable to any corporate body, person, or family that has created, accumulated, or maintained records of archival value, regardless of the medium or form of the records.
Information Areas
The standard organizes archival authority records into four information areas:
| Area | Purpose |
|---|---|
| Identity Area | Authorized form of name, dates of existence, type of entity |
| Description Area | History, places, functions, mandates, and internal structures |
| Relationships Area | Links to other corporate bodies, persons, and families |
| Control Area | Authority record identifier, institutional context, maintenance rules |
Each area contains defined elements with rules for content and presentation. The Identity Area is mandatory; other areas are populated according to the level of detail available and local descriptive policies.
Governance & Maintenance
ISAAR(CPF) is maintained by the International Council on Archives through its Committee on Descriptive Standards. The second edition (2003) remains the current version. The ICA has indicated that its newer framework, Records in Contexts (RiC), is intended to eventually supersede ISAAR(CPF) along with ISAD(G) and other existing ICA descriptive standards by providing a unified, graph-based model for archival description.
Notable Implementations
ISAAR(CPF) has been widely adopted in national archival systems and implemented through regional content standards. In the United States, Describing Archives: A Content Standard (DACS) incorporates ISAAR(CPF) principles for creator descriptions. The EAC-CPF (Encoded Archival Context — Corporate Bodies, Persons, and Families) XML schema provides a direct machine-readable encoding of ISAAR(CPF) records, enabling exchange and publication as linked data. National archives in numerous countries use ISAAR(CPF) as the basis for their authority record systems.
Related Standards
- EAC-CPF — XML encoding standard that directly implements the ISAAR(CPF) data model
- ISAD(G) — the companion ICA standard for describing archival records themselves
- DACS — the US national content standard that incorporates ISAAR(CPF) principles
- Records in Contexts (RiC) — the next-generation ICA standard intended to supersede ISAAR(CPF)