Have any of you who have been designing your own forms had problems with
putting the "Date" field onto the form?  I'm concerned that it doesn't
seem possible to add the "Begin Date" and "End Date", so if people
update the date field, they do so without updating the dates that I have
been telling people to use for searching.

Or am I missing an obvious way to search by date of object?  We've got a
fair number of objects in the collection that the official date is "not
dated", but users still want them to come up if they are doing a search
for works from a particular time period.  Putting "circa" dates into the
main date field seems to block them from coming up in a search by date
range, as do phrases like "nineteenth century", etc.  That's why I
really LOVE the "begin date" and "end date" fields...

Our previous database did not have them, and our conversion to TMS
seemed erratic with what records got begin and end dates updated.  We've
been making an effort to get them in there now, and have gotten some
success with getting people to search by them when they want a reliable
list of objects in a given range.  I'm concerned that if I let them
enter a date without the automatic updating of begin and end date, that
we'll have unreliable data again.  I almost don't want that field
available on the form if it doesn't allow for entering begin and end
dates.

Have any of you wrestled with this problem already?  I have a feeling
that I'm overlooking something very obvious again...

Thanks as always!

David

David Aylsworth
Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
Registrar for Collections
telephone:  713-639-7824
fax:  713-639-7780