According to the CCO – the search fields are the earliest and the latest, it makes no qualification about the activities between said dates.

CCO 4.2.3.2.6 “Specificity: Spans of years”

[for a sculpture]

Display Date: designed in 1462, cast in 1469

Earliest: 1462; Latest: 1469

In this example the years between the two activities are included, whether or not any work on the sculpture happened between them.

CCO 4.2.3.2.9 “Creative Activities on Different Dates” allows for qualifiers to be added to repeated “earliest/latest” date pairings, however, TMS does not recognize this formatting (except as a Historical Date).

Personally, I would use the following technique. Enter the Date Label as “1730 or 1750” with a search date of 1730-1750. I would then enter two historical dates as “1730-1730” and “1750-1750”, with Event Type “OAI search date” and the qualifier in the Remarks field. Then rework your OAI export process to only pull the search dates from the Objects table, whenever Historical Dates of Event Type “OAI search date” are not available. TMS searches may have a minor skew to them, but at least your OAI data would be perfect.

Blog: www.petrovay.com/tmsblog

From: The Museum System (TMS) Users [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Delmas-Glass, Emmanuelle
Sent: Thursday, February 18, 2010 9:22 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: indexing dates question

Hello all,

Because the TMS object date element is not repeatable, how do you index two years that are separated by some time (1730 or 1750)?

If I index the range end in the Dates Assistant End Date field that means that when I query 1740 this work will come up as a result even though I know for sure that it was not created in 1740.

I have thought about indexing the end of the range in Historical Dates but TMS date queries and data extraction (for OAI projects for example) would become a problem.

Thanks for your feedback,

Emmanuelle

Emmanuelle Delmas-Glass

Catalogue Specialist/Data Standards Administrator

Art Collections Information & Access

Yale Center for British Art

New Haven, CT

203-432-8454

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