Did you ever notice that American and Canadian phone numbers are both prefaced with the international calling code of “1”? This is because twenty countries, primarily in North America and the Caribbean, participate in the North American Numbering Plan (NANP). Let’s examine how these numbers are structured, establish standards for data entry and then apply …
Category :Data Governance
Improving the Quality of your Constituent Addresses
Since we do not tend to include the country name when addressing domestic mail, users tend to forget to enter this into the Constituent address. Having the country specified can enable you to perform certain queries, such as what is the geographic distribution for outgoing loans in a given year, and enables better formatting of …
Searching for a Date
According to Cataloging Cultural Objects: A Guide to Describing Cultural Works and Their Images, the creation date of an artifact is made up of three components: a free-text field, which is indexed using “two numbers to delimit the beginning and end of the implied date span.” In TMS, this information is recorded in the Objects.Dated, …
Return to Sender: Address Unknown
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 …