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
tel: 01 632 5525