Can I pester you all again? Our library staff loves
TMS, which is great since they are often the first interaction with the public
where interested people go to ask if we have something in the collection that
isn’t on view. They have their own detailed way of cataloguing, and
their own database for the book collection, and do not want to start using the
Bibliography module of TMS for that. They do, however, want to put data
about books in their collection into the Bibliography or Published References
text fields in TMS.
They would like their reference staff to easily be able to locate
books that refer to objects in the collection, while doing a search for the objects
in TMS.
Naturally, I’m excited that they’re
excited. I have asked them to come up with their own procedures for how
they would enter data and retrieve it, and they came up with some questions for
me that I couldn’t answer, so I need your help:
1.
What is the difference between “Bibliography”
and “Published Reference”? (I’ve got my own ideas, but
I’m curious how others have made the distinction)
2.
How many characters does each field hold?
3.
Can we change the tag labels on these fields if we
wanted to describe them differently or repurpose them? (I thought this
was a simple questions, but I couldn’t find either in dbconfig, so I
couldn’t answer it)
4.
Can they put a URL into the text field that might take
a user over to a place on the intranet or even to a spot in their system’s
database?
Any life experiences that you have about this type of thing
would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks as always,
David
David Aylsworth
Collections Registrar
Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
telephone: 713-639-7824
fax: 713-639-7780