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Nathan -
At the United Methodist Archives we normalize dates at the file level.  
As we understand it one of  date normalization's best use is for 
searching.  In such a scenario it does not help researchers to hit dates 
only at the record group or series levels;  which are likely to span a 
significant portion of the life of the institution or person.  If 
someone is researching on 1968, for example,  they are really interested 
in seeing folders that have material with that date inside them.

On a more mundane matter, we do use the normalized dates for printing.  
In our case it is our box labels.  We use an xsl script to print the 
collection title on the label, along with the first and last series 
titles in the box and the span of dates within the box.    Hope this helps

Dale

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

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L. Dale Patterson			[log in to unmask]
Archivist-Records Administrator		973-408-3195
United Methodist Church Archives	fax: 973-408-3909
Madison, NJ 07940			http://www.gcah.org