Hi Jane,
Thanks for raising this issue. I agree that there is a lot of greyness and variation when putting archival principles (such as respect des fonds) into practice, but it does not surprise me because the thinking that has led to these principles is trying to resolve an awful lot of complexity. This thinking can be seen in work ranging from that of Muller, Feith and Fruin (The so-called Dutch Manual) to Terry Cook (The concept of the archival fonds in the post-custodial era etc.) to Geoffrey Yeo (The Conceptual Fonds and the Physical Collection). To properly address your question, all this thinking would need to be considered. I can't give such a consideration here though, so I will finish with an alternative suggestion. One which, in my personal (but not entirely groundless - I have thought about this) opinion, might be truer to our archival principles.
I suggest we replace the name of creator field with a name of created one and make it mandatory when required. It would be required whenever anyone had chosen to arrange/process/present the material being described in such a way as to perpetrate a sense in which this material was in some way a natural outgrowth from and representation of a certain organic whole/particular body. In such cases that body, be it a person or an organisation, would be named in the name of created field. This would make it clear that there is a complexity in the archival concept of creation (provenance) which cannot be reduced to a single or even many named creators, but that there is also an archival practice of trying to process material in order to maintain a sense of the evolving workings and coherence of certain bodies.
Not sure if that makes sense, but you did ask for our views.
All the best,
Jenny
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