n.the process of establishing standardized names of entities and documenting their relationships among one anotherScott 1966, 500–501The Commonwealth Archives, although composed essentially of records created by Commonwealth Government agencies, includes records of other governments (some records of the Australian colonies and states were transferred to the Commonwealth on its establishment in 1901), of private organisations (e.g., those firms owned by enemy nationals, expropriated during the two World Wars), and of private persons and families (e.g., papers of former Commonwealth ministers and officers, many of which include nonofficial and family material). As a result, the context control system, needed to replace the record group, has been designed to cope with all known possibilities. ¶ There are four basic elements (organisation, agency, family, person), each of which is numbered independently but linked to the others by indexes . . .Evans 1986, 254The elements needed to control information about the agencies have not yet been well developed by archivists. Much of the information about agencies is found in the archival inventory, cast in terms of a record group or subgroup description. [Peter J.] Scott calls this “context control” information. The point is that there must be one set of data elements and standards for controlling records, another for information about agencies.Dryden 2007, 4–5Context control (a term [Adrian] Cunningham uses in his article) seems to serve the purpose, and could tentatively be defined as: ¶ the process of establishing the preferred form of the name of a records creator, describing the records creator and the functions and activities that produced the records, and showing the relationships among records creators, and between records creators, for use in archival descriptions.Wilson 2009, 152In other words, in the archival domain authority control is context control. But in fact in the archival domain context control is called context control, and there is little point in attempting to adopt and extend the meaning of a library term to describe an archival activity which already has an adequate professional term to describe it.Duranti and Franks 2015, 151Among them, there is one standard specifically focusing on context control: International Standard Archival Authority Record (Corporate Bodies, Persons, Families) (ISAAR [CPF]).Wisser 2017, 251In her introduction to a special issue of the Journal of Archival Organization on authority control in archives, Jean Dryden suggests a new rhetoric for talking about authority control in the archival setting: context control. The notion of context control extends the traditional focus of single-name representations to other aspects of the entity that are equally important. Context control not only engages with names but uses the basic activities of entities for identity disambiguation and for providing more accurate representations.
