Outside a cubicle at the Walters Art Museum hangs an envelope from a letter, mailed from the UK, bearing the institution’s Baltimore, Maryland address and a prominent stamp “Missent to Thailand.” I’m not sure which is more amusing: that the letter was sent to Thailand, or that this happens with such frequency that the Royal Mail has a dedicated stamp for just this situation. With institutions emphasizing data standards when cataloging cultural objects, are we also instituting standards for constituent addresses?

Five tips for working with constituent addresses:

1. The majority of constituents will be from the same country as the institution. Even if you needn’t include the country name in the address, you should always record it in TMS.
2. Consult with your postal system. Many will have published addressing standards and guidelines, like USPS Publication 28 (also available as a PDF).
3. When adding an new country to the Countries Authority, make sure you use the appropriate Address Format. For details, see “Constituent Address Formats and Countries” on page 22-30 of your TMS Manual. Consult my spreadsheet of address formats and the countries that use them.
4. The Universal Postal Union has a compendium of addressing standards used by member countries. This can help determine the Address Format, or parse a foreign address into it’s component parts.
5. When creating Crystal Reports, use {ConAddress.DisplayAddress}, which marries the address information with the address format.

Maybe I’m just a data fascist, but I prefer to properly format postal addresses instead of routing correspondence through Thailand.

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