Amy, Thanks very much for your comments. I'd be interested in seeing your documentation on this issue and think that GS hosted data style/content trading webpage would be a great idea. It does seem like we are headed in the same direction with our data entry references and, as you mentioned, achieving parallelism between the curators and other specialists is a particular challenge. Toward that end, we have an administration appointed representative from the curatorial staff to consult and comment on TMS and public access data content issues, so we have a liason between myself and the curators. The process here until recently was that Collections Management staff performed all data entry in a somewhat cumbersome exchange of printed reports (cataloging worksheets) where curatorial edits were entered only by our dept. Winning our curators over to cataloguing directly into TMS has been a long process, but well worth the time needed to cultivate their participation. One of our major style/content concerns, as museum(s) of predominately Asian art, is that TMS support foreign language characters - Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Arabic, etc. Are any other of you also dealing with this issue? Up to now we have only experimented with scanning cataloguing sheets that contain foreign language character and attaching those documents as images to the object records. David >>> [log in to unmask] 07/16/02 06:26PM >>> >>> dave.pearce.... >snip< I have produced a TMS data entry manual which is part instructional guide to doing the actual data entry in TMS, and part style guide. As I work on this one manual it is becoming clear that we might benefit from a data entry manual (an extract from the TMS User's Manual) and a style guide (Data content and formats) as separate references. Are any other of you heading in this direction? >>>> It sounds from these posts, that a lot of us are doing similar things. I wonder if Gallery Systems would be interested in creating a place on their web site for TMS users to post and access the various in-house documentation many of us are creating? Jay? Parallelism in data entry between specialists: This is challenging. Especially, if there's no mandate from the top. One thing that has helped especially in the area of provenance is the manadate from the Association of American Art Museums to make this information more available to the public especially where there are gaps in provenance during the Nazi era. In this area, we started by gaining consensous between the departments that were ready to field the information which were, paintings and sculpture. Those discussions included a representative from manuscripts who were not ready, the special projects assistant to the Associate Director for Curatorial Affairs, a data entry operator and a staff assistant who actually do a lot of the data entry. It was interesting to see the specialist's realize that what they thought was so clear and easy to understand was not necessarily so to those outside their area of expertise. Amy Noel The J. Paul Getty Museum