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, Objects.DateBegin, and Objects.DateEnd fields respectively. TMS can accurately determine the beginning and end years of the span, when the date consist of a single year, a span of years, or when the ambiguity of the year is implied with “circa,” but when the creation date is expressed by the nearest decade or century, you will need to enter the search dates manually.
Tag: data standards
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Searching for a Date
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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 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?
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