Implementing the Concept of Fonds: Primary Access Point, Multilevel Description and Authority Control

Terry Cook has given a historical overview of the fonds concept and the difficulties encountered in implementing it.2 It is clear from Cook's essay that, for the fonds concept to be applied fully and consistently in a set of rules, an 'administrative procedure' needs to be outlined, so that the solution suggested by Cook, that of using authority control, may in fact be applied and implemented. The purpose of this discussion, therefore, is to outline that 'administrative procedure.' In doing so, the discussion will attempt to address many of the difficulties that Cook's essay has raised regarding the practical application of the fonds concept. The structure of the fonds and its parts is a reflection of its arrangement. The rules concerned with multilevel description have been designed to deal with that structure. (More on this topic will appear in section 3 of the paper.) RAD incorporates the concept of main entry, adapted for archival description. In the RAD glossary, the concepts of creator and custody are separated into provenance, creator and custodial history. Since the main entry, now called primary access point in RAD, is the fundamental instrument that will be used to control the parameters of the fonds, an explanation of the main entry concept, where it comes from and how it has been applied in libraries, will not only be useful but essential for the understanding of the purpose and function of access points in general and of the primary access point in particular. Considerable attention, therefore, is paid to this in the first section of the paper. In the suggested 'administrative procedure,' moreover, authority records are deployed to control the primary and additional access points. How this is to be done will form the last section of the paper.