An agent, in Garance, according to the Records in Contexts standard and other metadata models, is any entity that carries out an activity (see the definition of the Agent class in the RiC-O ontology).
For now, the agents described in Garance are individuals, corporate bodies, or families who have played or still play a role in the creation, accumulation, or management of records held by the Archives nationales de France (AnF), or who are the subject of these records.
The detailed description of these agents and their relationships is of great importance in archival science: it helps to contextualize archival fonds and collections and facilitate research for scholars, citizens, and institutions.
Most of the agent records in Garance, with their rich content, are therefore not simple database entries: they are keys to understanding or writing the administrative, cultural, and social history of France.
On this page, discover:
These charts provide a synthetic overview of the diversity of agents described by the archivists of the Archives nationales de France. They allow you to:
To illustrate the quality and diversity of descriptions of agents, here is a selection of particularly complete and representative descriptions:
Note: Each example is clickable and leads to the full record, where you can explore the associated relationships and metadata.