Dear Carolyn -
The way we do it is through a single "Unknown" constituent record. We (would, if we had such an old object) track "17th Century" in the Historical dates section of the database (1600-1699). The rule would be to leave the display date field blank (but enter 1600 into "begin date" and 1699 into "end date" fields), and then qualify the "Unknown" constituent through using the suffix field in the constituent record, entering ", 17th Century" into it, which would then look like this:
Unknown, 17th Century
This way, both "Unknown" and the Date is searchable, without too much confusion to people.
Of course, this means that you will need to create a formula to get the constituent information to print correctly in your reports, but if we can do it here (we have), so can you!
Good luck.
Allison
-----Original Message-----
From: The Museum System (TMS) Users
[mailto:[log in to unmask]]On Behalf Of Barbara Furbush
Sent: Tuesday, August 09, 2005 12:07 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: 'Unknown' Constituent Records
Dear Caroline,
You may want to check Cataloging Cultural Objects (CCO) http://www.vraweb.org/CCOweb/index.html . The Visual Resource Association is developing this set of guidelines to promote good descriptive cataloging. Also, if you check the archives of the VRA-L http://www.vraweb.org/vralist.htm you will discover a lively debate about this issue.
Barbara Furbush
Villa Library Reference Librarian
Getty Research Institute
1200 Getty Center Drive
Los Angeles CA 90049-1688
310 440-7151 voice
310 440-7780 fax
[log in to unmask]
>>> [log in to unmask] 08/09/05 08:52AM >>>
Dear All
Just wondering if any of you are able to advise on how best to deal with
'unknown' artists in terms of constituent records.
At the moment we only have one constituent record called 'Unknown' with
over 1300 works linked to this record. In our legacy data many of these
unknowns did actually have a date e.g. Unknown, 17th century.
Unfortunately this was not addressed at the time of the migration and
these dates are not on TMS.
I think one way to address this would be to have different 'Unknown'
constituents for each century e.g. Unknown, 17th century; Unknown 18th
century; and a general unknown where we don't have a date.
What are your thoughts on this? What would be another way to deal with
this?
However, we do have some works with the artist 'unknown' but with a more
specific date e.g. Unknown, c1630. We can't have tens of 'unknown'
constituents for every single given date.
For some records I could put the date of the 'unknown' as the date of
the work but this would not always be appropriate e.g. in the case of
prints etc. Unless it was entered as a historical date?
Any suggestions would be gratefully received.
Many thanks
Caroline Delahunty
TMS Officer
National Gallery of Ireland
Merrion Square West
Dublin 2
tel: 01 632 5525
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