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As far as the way the visible date is written, I would think that you need not bother changing that at all unless you have more time and money than you know what to do with; we don't usually alter the way the dates appear in legacy finding aids when we do conversion, unless for some reason it affects the usefulness of the finding aid (e.g. if the format is so vague as to be uninterpretable or ambiguous enough to lead to more than one interpretation). As far as using the unitdate tag, I'd be strongly inclined to include that in the conversion process if at all possible; it's a pretty basic and highly useful tag that you know you'll be using someday, even if not at the moment. If you're doing the conversion in-house, or if the files are already in EAD but missing some unitdate elements (which it sounds like they may be), you may want to have a conversation with one of your techie folks to see if they could write some kind of script that would automate the unitdate tagging. As far as not using the normal attribute, since you don't have a way to search them at the moment you won't be missing anything, but a couple of other considerations do come to mind. For one thing, while you may not be able to search the normal attribute you may want to contributing your files to some other database / project / consortium that does understand and use it. Also, if you're outsourcing the conversion, it makes more sense to include that in the tasking and get it done as part of the process to save time/money. If you're doing the conversion in-house, or if the files are already in EAD, again maybe your techie folks could write some kind of script that would automatically fill in the normal attribute. Should you let this hold you up from publishing the finding aid? That depends on how you're publishing them. If you're just putting flat files out on a server someplace, I'd say go ahead because you can always replace them with updated versions of the files that have the unitdate/normal problems corrected. On the other hand, if you're putting your files into a database of some sort, you will probably want to investigate how easy it will be to either (a) add the unitdate information to the database records later or (b) reimport corrected versions of the files into the database. Michele C. -=|=--=|=---=|=---=|=---=|=---=|=---=|=---=|=-- Michele R. Combs Librarian for Manuscripts and Archives Processing Special Collections Research Center Syracuse University Library 222 Waverly Avenue Syracuse, NY 13244 (315) 443-9758 -=|=--=|=---=|=---=|=---=|=---=|=---=|=---=|=-- >>> [log in to unmask] 7/10/2007 2:08:44 PM >>> Thanks for asking for clarification. I had initially meant using the "normal" attribute, but I would appreciate thoughts on the former as well. I see that our legacy finding aids have dates in a variety of formats, and many <unitdates> aren't even defined as such. I would prefer not to hold off publishing our EADs until all this is fixed, unless I'd be running some serious risks. Deena M. Schwimmer, Associate Archivist Yeshiva University Archives / 500 W. 185th St. / 6th Floor / New York, NY 10033 email: [log in to unmask] <mailto:[log in to unmask]> / phone: (212) 960-5451 / fax: (212) 960-0066 -----Original Message----- From: Encoded Archival Description List [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Michele Combs Sent: Tuesday, July 10, 2007 1:09 PM To: [log in to unmask] Subject: Re: Normalization of Dates Clarification: when you say "normalizing" do you mean "changing the way the date is written to be in a consistent format" or do you mean "using the normal attribute in the unitdate element" ? Michele C. -=|=--=|=---=|=---=|=---=|=---=|=---=|=---=|=-- Michele R. Combs Librarian for Manuscripts and Archives Processing Special Collections Research Center Syracuse University Library 222 Waverly Avenue Syracuse, NY 13244 (315) 443-9758 -=|=--=|=---=|=---=|=---=|=---=|=---=|=---=|=-- >>> [log in to unmask] 7/9/2007 4:00:01 PM >>> I would appreciate thoughts on risks of not normalizing the dates of legacy EADs before publishing them, at least in the short term, while we don't have a facility to search across them. Thanks in advance, Deena Schwimmer ________________