Hi Nathan,

We are normalizing our dates at all levels here at UD. 

While we aren't gaining any direct value out of it yet, I believe that 
we will in the future.  It's easier to take a few extra minutes now than 
to have to revisit every finding aid down the road.  We are using a 
slightly modified version of Jason Casden's normalization perl script:  
http://www.archivists.org/saagroups/ead/tools.html

Best,
Jaime

Nathan Tallman wrote:
> Good morning,
>
> I'd like to take a quick and extremely informal survey.  How many 
> institutions are normalizing dates at the file level?  My past 
> institution only normalized dates at the top, series, and subseries 
> levels.  The rational was that it's not worth the time to normalize at 
> the file level because there aren't enough publishing options 
> available that utilize the data.  (Plus, there's a script to normalize 
> dates if it's needed.)  My current institution is looking at best 
> practices for our encoding and I'd be interested to hear what others 
> are doing .
>
> Thanks,
> Nathan Tallman


-- 

Jaime L. Margalotti
Senior Assistant Librarian
Special Collections Department University of Delaware Library
Newark, DE  19717-5267
302-831-0554
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