Hi - I'm resending this because I received a message saying that the last file was too large to send to the listserve. So, I copied the bitmap into a Word document, in the hopes of trimming the file size. My apologies if you get this twice, or if you don't have Word and cant open the attachment... Allison -----Original Message----- From: Smith, Allison Sent: Friday, March 21, 2003 9:10 AM To: 'The Museum System (TMS) Users' Subject: RE: Objects out on loan Hi all - I too have been toying around with the idea of tracking our off-site exhibition places (Continent, Country, State, City..possibly name of borrowing institution) in the location authority ...but wonder if this isn't being redundant, and complicating the Location Authority - since the off-site locations for a given object will be tracked in the Loans module? I've attached a visual of our Location Authority, so you can see what I'm talking about as far as setting up Countries, Cities, etc. as locations. Again, I am a very new user to the system. In fact, we are just about to sign off on our conversion, and are still not even actively using the system yet. But, I'm curious what people think about this idea - tracking the off-site locations for venues in the Location authority, as well as in the Loans module (like in the Attributes section)....would one be better than the other? What I would like is for people to have the flexibility to create a query to answer a question like - "Which objects from our collection traveled to Europe in 2001?" or "Which objects have been on exhibition somewhere in the United States in the past 5 years". (we loan so much stuff, in such large quantities, all over the world...that it will become necessary at some point, to be able to answer these questions, for a variety of reasons...) In order to harvest data to answer these questions - would the Loans module be the best place to query this data? Or, the Locations module? Is it redundant in any way to have the information in both places? What advantage would it be to have the information in one over the other? Thanks for any/all answers... Allison .................................................................. .................................................................. the warhol: Allison A. Smith Collection Manager / Database Administrator 117 Sandusky Street Pittsburgh, PA 15212 T 412.237.8345 F 412.237.8340 E [log in to unmask] <mailto:[log in to unmask]> W www.warhol.org <http://www.warhol.org> W www.warholstore.com <http://www.warholstore.com> The Andy Warhol Museum One of the four Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh .................................................................. ..................................................................