loupeThe maker
How loupe records the person who made a work — and how that lines up with the systems museums, libraries and archives use to say who someone is.
Two people in one picture
A photograph of a work involves two people, and they are rarely the same one: the person who made the work, and the person who took the photograph. The standard keeps them in separate fields, and so does loupe.
- The maker — you, or whoever made the piece — goes in the artwork's own creator field.
- The photographer — you, a studio, a friend with a good camera — goes in the photograph's creator field.
Neither is ever filled in from the other, and neither is ever guessed from your site's name. If you haven't said who took a photograph, that field stays empty rather than quietly crediting you for it.
A name field holds a name
This is the part people are usually surprised by. A creator field is not a caption — it's an index. Software sorts it, searches it, groups by it and matches it across collections. So it holds the name and nothing else.
Take a well-known photographer. In a professional system he is recorded as Ansel Adams. Not Ansel Adams (American, 1902–1984) — because the moment one file says one and another file says the other, they are two different photographers to the software holding them, and neither sorts next to the other.
The dates are real and worth keeping. They simply belong somewhere else.
Where a life story goes instead
The answer the museum and library world settled on long ago is a name authority: a separate record, kept once, that says who a person is — their preferred name, the other spellings of it, their dates, their nationality, what they did. A file doesn't repeat any of that. It carries the name, and — where the system supports it — a short identifier pointing at the authority record.
The reason is maintenance, not tidiness. A biography copied into ten thousand files is wrong in ten thousand files the day it changes.
| Name authority | Who is in it | Best for |
|---|---|---|
| Getty ULAN Union List of Artist Names | Artists, architects, studios and firms, curated from what museums hold | Artists with museum provenance. ⚠ A working artist without it is usually simply absent |
| VIAF Virtual International Authority File | Anyone who created, or is the subject of, a published work — gathered from national libraries | Name forms across languages and scripts |
| LCNAF Library of Congress Name Authority File | Names used in library cataloguing | Anyone whose work has been catalogued in the United States |
| Wikidata | Anyone notable at all — openly edited | Linking. Its entry for a person carries the identifiers of all the others, it's free to use, and it's the easiest to look something up in |
| ISNI International Standard Name Identifier | The public identity of a creator — artists, writers, performers, and organizations | An international standard rather than one institution's list. The likeliest of these for a living, working artist to already have |
One of them keeps dates inside the name on purpose — the Library of Congress writes a heading like Adams, Ansel, 1902-1984 — and it's worth knowing why: that string is a catalogue entry whose job is to be unique among other headings. It isn't a credit line, and it isn't what goes in a picture file.
What loupe does today
- The maker is your own words. Written per work, never taken from your catalogue's name, never composed from facts loupe happens to know. If you write Workshop of the Master of the Housebook, that is what travels.
- Every file loupe hands out carries it. The pictures on your site, anything a visitor downloads, your submission packets, your own copy to keep. In JPEGs the record is written inside the file, in both the current standard and the older one photo software has read for thirty years, with the same values in each so no tool disagrees with another.
- Your original is never modified. What you uploaded stays byte-for-byte as you sent it. The record is written into the copies that leave, at the moment they're made — so if you change a record later, the copies are rewritten and your original is still your original.
- A photograph's credit stays the photograph's. As above: two people, two fields, two copyright notices, and loupe never writes a copyright notice you didn't write.
For anyone who wants the exact fields. The maker travels as Iptc4xmpExt:AOCreator, inside the standard's ArtworkOrObject structure, beside the artwork's title, date, physical description and copyright notice. The photographer travels as dc:creator. Everything loupe keeps that the standard has no room for is written under loupe's own name, so software that doesn't know it passes over it. The full field-by-field mapping is on your work's metadata.
What loupe doesn't do — yet
loupe does not write a maker identifier. The standard has a field for one, and we don't fill it. So if you're assessing loupe as an archive: what you get is your own record, in standard fields, unembellished. It is not an authority record and doesn't pretend to resolve who anyone is.
If we add it, it will be something you may attach, never something you must fill in — because most working artists are in none of these systems, and a tool that demands an identifier before it will record your name has its priorities backwards. It matters in three real cases, and they're the ones we think about:
- Work whose maker is documented somewhere else — where loupe holds the pictures and a museum or a library holds the biography.
- An artist whose name is easily confused with another's.
- An estate — attribution that has to stay unambiguous long after the artist is gone, which is ground loupe already takes seriously.
The same question, about materials
There are controlled lists for materials and techniques too — the Getty's Art & Architecture Thesaurus is the big one, and terms like chromogenic print and soft-paste porcelain are entries in it. loupe doesn't use it: your medium is the sentence you wrote.
The same rule applies if we ever do. A vocabulary can be offered — a suggestion as you type, a term you may accept — but it cannot be demanded, because a list that refuses the phrase an artist chose for their own work has let the record overrule the artist. That trade never comes out in the artist's favour.
What this means for you
- Your maker line is yours. loupe writes what you wrote, and adds nothing to it.
- Dates, biography and the story of a person belong on a page about them — not repeated into every file.
- Files you hand to a publisher, a gallery or an archive carry the credits in the form their software already reads.
- If someone asks whether your archive is "linked" to ULAN or Wikidata: not yet, honestly, and you'll be the one who decides it if it ever is.
Questions: [email protected].
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