We've never been able to use the TGN, because there is no way to mark the museum's preferred term - so user have to deal with the multitude of entries without knowing which one we use. Plus, a search on "Paris" amply shows that it provides way too much irrelevant information to be useful.

So I created a section in our local thesaurus, which we use primarily to link country keywords to each record with "origin" geography. This is redundant, but works quite well for objects that might say "Afghanistan or Pakistan" - in which case the record get both the "Afghanistan" and "Pakistan" keywords and the label tells the story once the record is found.

But it does give users the ability to search for broad areas like "East Asia" and get everything accurately.

Here is a screen shot of this section of our thesaurus:

[cid:image001.png@01CEFB3B.DBF2AE80]

From: The Museum System (TMS) Users [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Suzanne Stephens
Sent: Tuesday, December 17, 2013 10:06 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Advice needed on Attributes

Hello, wise TMS users. Our museum did not get the TGN when we originally converted to TMS because most of the geographical terms were not needed for our collection cataloguing. However, I am now trying to create an attribute that would make it easy to find all of the works created in Europe. I have played around with Geography/ Continent/ Europe on the Constituent record as well as creating an Attribute for Location/Continent/Europe. If anyone already has this functionality, could you send me a screen shot or a "best practices" recommendation for this purpose? I also need to do the same thing for Africa, so I suspect that I should add a geographical context for every object related constituent.  I would love to hear how other people have dealt with this.

--Suzanne Stephens
Database Administrator

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