An agent is a person or an organisation the catalogue cites: artist, printer, gallery, museum, collector, curator, auction house… One entity for all of them: the role is carried by each relation, not by the agent. The same gallery can be the transferor in a provenance and the venue of an exhibition.
Agents are used throughout the catalogue raisonné: authors of attributions, printers and holders of prints, parties to provenance, auction houses, conservators, rights holders, exhibition venues.
The directory
The Agents section lists the directory. Search agents filters by name; the Kind menu shows only persons or only organisations. A symbol marks agents that have an authority identifier. The list shows at most 500 agents at a time; beyond that, the header gives their total number and a line under the search says how many are not shown: refine the search to find them. The exports always read the whole directory.
Adding an agent
New agent…, at the top of the list, opens a sheet: type the Name, choose Person or Organisation, then Create.
Before creating it, Catalog looks for an agent with the same normalised name: case, accents and punctuation are ignored, but no fuzzy matching is attempted. If it finds any, the sheet names them before anything is created: Use “…” opens the existing agent, Create anyway creates the new one, Cancel gives up. Two namesakes may be two different parties: the decision is yours.
You can also create an agent when citing it: in any field that searches the directory (an attribution’s agent, From, To, printer, auction house, conservator, rights holder, exhibition venue…), Create “…” creates it on the spot, with the same check (alert “An agent with this name already exists”).
An agent’s record
Choose an agent to edit its record:
- Identity — Name, Kind, Index name (for sorting); for a person, Given name, Family name, Born, Died; Nationality, Place;
- Usual roles — artist, printer, gallery, museum, collector, curator, expert, publisher, auction house, foundation, laboratory, other. They are used for filtering; the role in a given fact remains carried by the relation;
- Personal data (persons) — Living person (GDPR);
- Disclosure — Confidential (see Confidential agents);
- Authority identifiers — VIAF, ULAN, Wikidata, ISNI, ORCID. These are what let a museum export point to an identified resource rather than to a bare name;
- Internal note — never exported and never printed;
- Related works — the works that cite the agent (attribution, print, provenance of the work or of one of its prints, auction sale, conservation intervention, rights), by number; each opens its record (see Moving from one record to another).
At the top of the record, Edited flags unsaved changes; Save (⌘S) writes the record, Revert discards the changes. Choosing another agent with changes in progress asks the same question as a work’s record (see Identification): Save, Don’t Save or Cancel.
Living persons
Ticking Living person (GDPR) forces confidentiality on every provenance event where this person is the transferor or the recipient, those already entered as well as those to come: their Confidential box is ticked and locked as long as the person is living. Amounts are kept: a confidential event goes into no LIDO or CIDOC export, no report and no certificate, and its amount only leaves Catalog in a CSV export where you include confidential records, with a justification (see Including confidential records).
A person stops being living when you untick the option or enter a death date (the option is then unticked and greyed out). Their events can be edited like any other again; their Confidential box stays as it is, until you untick it yourself. When either record of a merge is a living person, every provenance event of the kept record (those moved to it included) becomes confidential, amounts kept.
Confidential agents
Tick Confidential, in the record’s Disclosure group (persons and organisations), so that an agent does not leave Catalog: a collector who does not want to be named, a transferor bound to secrecy. The rule is that of a confidential record: absent, not masked. Whatever its role (author or asserter of an attribution, printer, transferor or recipient, auction house, conservator, rights holder, venue or curator of an exhibition, publisher of a publication), the agent appears in no LIDO or CIDOC export, no report and no certificate: neither its name, nor its authority identifiers, nor its role. The work, event or exhibition citing it leaves as if no agent were given, without the free-text place (an exhibition’s venue, a provenance event’s place) standing in for it; the other party of an event is still named. In the CSV export and Export this table…, it is named, and has its row in agents.csv, only when the export includes confidential records, with a justification (see The confidentiality rule).
A work whose photographer (the accepted attribution) is a confidential agent cannot be certified: the certificate would name them, and a certificate without an author attests nothing. The issuance sheet says so beforehand (“The work’s photographer is a confidential agent”).
The box changes nothing on screen: the agent is still named in records, lists and the works table. When one of the two records of a merge is confidential, the kept record becomes so.
Duplicates and merging
Two records for the same party distort the provenance. Catalog helps you find them, but never merges on its own.
Reviewing duplicates
Duplicates to review (n), at the top of the list, opens the review: each group gathers records whose normalised name is identical. For each group, Keep this one… on the record to keep, then confirm: the others are merged into it. Or leave the group as it is: two namesakes may be two different parties.
In an agent’s record, the Possible duplicates part also offers Merge into this one… for each record with the same normalised name.
What a merge does
Every reference of the merged record — attributions, prints, provenance, auction sales, conservation interventions, rights, series defaults, exhibitions, publications, certificates — moves to the kept record, then the merged record is deleted. A print’s printer and an attribution’s agent moved this way are recorded in their work’s change history (origin Agent merge), under both names. A merge cannot be undone. Merging two genuinely different parties would silently rewrite a provenance.
Deleting an agent
Delete…, at the top of the record next to Revert and Save, asks for confirmation. An agent that is still referenced cannot be deleted, whatever the reference: agent of an attribution (or who asserted it), printer or holder of a print, transferor or recipient of a provenance event, auction house of an auction sale, conservator of a conservation intervention, rights holder of a work or of a series’ defaults, default agent of a series, venue of an exhibition, publisher of a publication, issuer or recipient of a certificate. The refusal shows at the top of its record, says where it is cited (“attributions (2)”, “auction sales (1)”…) and lists the works concerned, each opening its record to correct the reference there. If it is a duplicate, merge it into the record that replaces it instead: its references follow.