I agree with Mary Ellen.  We especially have run into issues searching
with diacritics in TMS.  We want to use diacritics in primary names,
however it means that you need to know that an artist's name has a
diacritic in order to search for it.  If TMS had an option like Mary
Ellen suggested, and we include name versions without diacritics as
alternates, that would seem to solve the issue and would be very helpful
to TMS users.

Ella Rothgangel
Collections Database Administrator
Saint Louis Art Museum
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-----Original Message-----
From: The Museum System (TMS) Users [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
On Behalf Of Mary Ellen Guerra
Sent: Thursday, January 22, 2004 11:15 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Constituent Module: von, van, de, and other particles

Hi All,

Another point about variant names for constituents that Suzanne
Quigley's
reply brings to mind.  It would be really, really useful if TMS had an
option to search on either the preferred form of the constituent name or
on
all the variants as well.  Perhaps it could work the way objects allows
you
to search on all objects or all accessioned objects.



Mary Ellen Guerra
Smithsonian American Art Museum
Washington, DC 20560-0970
Tel: 202-275-1553
Fax: 202-275-1707
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>>> [log in to unmask] 01/16/04 05:10PM >>>
We have just been through conversion and we're beginning to use TMS, so
I
have been using the TMS Support Site for reference. In the Shared
Resources,
the Getty has provided documentation for how they enter data. They have
an
excellent quick guide to alphabetizing the artist names with prefixes.
It
is
in the Getty's manual under "Adding Constituent Records"--page 8. It is
useful to see how they have organized it.

Suzanne Stephens
Database Administrator
Birmingham Museum of Art

-----Original Message-----
From: Suzanne Quigley ( [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Friday, January 16, 2004 4:01 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Constituent Module: von, van, de, and other particles


Hi Linda,

Use ULAN if possible to determine the preferred spelling of the last
name.
Of course there will always be the oddballs - I will never forget that
at
a
museum where I worked once upon a time, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe was in
the
database as "van der Rohe", when, in fact, the whole last name is "Mies
van
der Rohe".  It doesn't follow logic, thus look to an authority or
establish
it for yourselves for names not found in an authority listing.

Cheers on a cold New York afternoon!

Suzanne

-----Original Message-----
From: Linda Pulliam [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Friday, January 16, 2004 4:50 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Constituent Module: von, van, de, and other particles


If you have a moment, would you please let me know where your
organization
enters this information? Do you use the last name field or the middle
name
field?

Staff here are of two minds about where it belongs depending on the life
dates of the artists and their nationalities. Inconsistencies are
leading
to
searching problems and the creation of duplicate constituent records.

Linda Pulliam
Manager of Collections Information
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston