Dear TMS users,

 

If anyone has dealt with varying company names I’d appreciate your input. In the musical-instrument world we quite often have companies that used different names at different times. For example, we currently have the following constituents:

 

Orville Gibson

Gibson, Inc.

Gibson Mandolin-Guitar Company

Gibson USA

 

These are not Alternate Names per se since they represent distinct periods of the company's history. We've been looking for a way to implement an umbrella-type term in order for us to retrieve, in this case, all objects made by all iterations of Gibson. But at the same time we want to be able to limit search results to a specific company name. I've been experimenting with the Alternate Names field but I don't think this will work for us for two reasons:

 

1. You cannot assign the specific Alternate Name to an object record. (TMS assigns the main constituent.)

2. You cannot limit your search results to a specific alternate name.

 

I've also experimented with Parent-Child relationships in the Constituent module, but this doesn't seem to accomplish much in terms of search and retrieval.

 

We are considering adding a master term, in this case, "Gibson", to each object record that has one of the constituents listed above. This would allow us to search on the master term, and also any of the specific iterations of the company.

 

If you have done this or something similar I'd love to hear from you.

 

Thanks,

Rodger

 

P.S. I very much enjoyed CI 2016. Thanks to everyone who was involved!

 

RODGER KELLY Collections Manager  /  TMS (The Museum System) Administrator National Music Museum University of South Dakota 414 E. Clark St., Vermillion SD 57069 http://nmmusd.org [log in to unmask] (605) 677-5306

 

 

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