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