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Jun 25, 2026

Heratio Help Center article. Category: User Guide.

ahgActorManagePlugin — Authority Records

The ahgActorManagePlugin is Heratio's surface for authority records — the people, families, and corporate bodies that created, donated, or are otherwise associated with archival material. They are described according to ISAAR(CPF) (International Standard Archival Authority Record — Corporate bodies, Persons, Families).

Authority records are kept separately from archival descriptions so the same person/body can be referenced by many records without duplication, and so authority data (biographies, dates, mandates) can be edited in one place.

What it does

Capability Detail
Browse /actor/browse — paged, faceted, filterable by entity type (person / family / corporate body) and by repository
Show /actor/<slug> — full ISAAR(CPF) detail page with the record's history, dates, mandates, related records, and i18n variants
Add /actor/add — create a new authority record (any logged-in editor)
Edit /actor/<slug>/edit — update fields, including authorized form of name, parallel forms, dates, places, mandates, history
Merge /admin/actor/merge — collapse two duplicate authority records into one, preserving every link
Autocomplete /actor/autocomplete — JSON endpoint used by the IO edit page when adding a creator
External linking VIAF, Wikidata, GeoNames lookups via /admin/ric/lookup-external (requires ahgRicExplorerPlugin)

ISAAR(CPF) field set

The edit form mirrors ISAAR(CPF) exactly — every field maps to a column in actor or actor_i18n:

  • 1.1 Identity area — entity type, authorized form of name, parallel forms, standardised forms, other forms, identifiers
  • 1.2 Description area — dates of existence, history, places, legal status, functions/occupations/activities, mandates, internal structures, general context
  • 1.3 Relationships area — links to other actors (employer, member-of, parent-of, etc.) — uses the generic relation table
  • 1.4 Control area — authority-record identifier, institution responsible, rules/conventions, status (draft/published), revision history, sources

Multilingual: every i18n field has per-culture rows in actor_i18n. Switching the site locale switches what's displayed.

Common workflows

Adding a creator while cataloguing

The most common path: you're editing an information object and need to attribute it to a person who isn't in the system yet.

  1. Open the IO edit page (/<slug>/edit).
  2. In the Creators section, type the creator's name. The autocomplete polls /actor/autocomplete.
  3. If no match, click Create new — a modal opens with the minimal "authorized form of name + entity type" fields.
  4. Save — the actor row is created and immediately linked back to the IO via the event table (creator event).
  5. Open /actor/<new-slug> later to flesh out the biography, dates, mandates, etc.

Merging duplicates

Authority data accumulates duplicates over time — typo variants, naming conventions ("Smith, J." vs "Smith, John"), or legacy import artefacts.

  1. Open /admin/actor/merge.
  2. Pick the survivor (the canonical record) and one or more doomed duplicates.
  3. Review the merge preview — every information object link, every relation, every i18n string is shown.
  4. Confirm. The doomed records' object_ids are repointed to the survivor's id and the doomed actor rows are deleted.

Audit trail: every merge writes a row in ahg_audit_log with the from/to ids and the editor's user id (when ahgAuditTrailPlugin is enabled).

Bulk import from CSV

For migrations, you can ingest authority records from CSV via the AtoM Authority Records template at /researcher/import/csv or /informationobject/import/csv (the wizard auto-detects the entity type from the column set).

Settings (/admin/settings/ahg/authority)

  • Completeness scoring — calculates a 0-100 score from how many ISAAR(CPF) fields are filled. Drives the per-record completeness badge on browse.
  • NER pipeline — when enabled and ahgAIPlugin is on, every IO save runs a name-entity recognition pass and offers to link extracted person/org names to existing authority records (or create new ones).
  • Auto-merge threshold — string-similarity score (default 0.95) above which the merge tool auto-pre-selects "this looks like the same record".
  • External lookup default — VIAF / Wikidata / GeoNames — primary source for the /admin/ric/lookup-external widget.

Permissions

Action Required role
Browse, view Anonymous (public records only) / authenticated (all)
Add, edit Editor (acl:create, acl:update)
Merge Administrator
Delete Administrator
Bulk import Administrator

ACL groups are configured at /aclGroup; per-record clearance overrides are at /admin/security-clearance.

Common gotchas

  • Source culture vs current locale — actor.source_culture is the language the authority record was originally written in. The site shows the user's current locale, falling back to source_culture if no translation exists. Edits under the locale en create an actor_i18n row with culture='en' — they don't overwrite the source if it's a different language.
  • Class-table inheritance — actor is the parent of repository, donor, rights_holder, and user. Deleting an actor row through the UI cascades to the subclass row; merging only collapses peer-class duplicates (you can't merge a person into a repository).
  • Slugs aren't auto-regenerated — renaming the authorized form of name does not rename the URL. To rename the slug too, use /actor/<slug>/rename (admins only).
  • ahgActorCompletenessPlugin — adds the per-actor completeness widget on browse and show
  • ahgAuthorityPlugin — extends with NER linking, external authority resolution, and occupation/function browse
  • ahgRicExplorerPlugin — RiC graph view of an actor's relationships
  • ahgAuditTrailPlugin — change-history log
  • Help articles: AHG Authority Records — User Guide (deeper dive into ISAAR(CPF) field semantics)