Where a number of repositories hold archival documents from a given source, they can more easily share or link contextual information about this source if it has been maintained in a standardised manner. The primary purpose of this standard is to provide general rules for the establishment of archival authority records that describe the corporate bodies, persons and families that may be named as creators in descriptions of archival documents. It is expected that records that result from the implementation of the rules can serve both to standardise the form of the name of a records creator and to describe fully the attributes of the creator needed to appreciate the context of creation of a body of archival documents.