Nathan,

 

I’m not sure if this will help at all (as I haven’t looked back through the responses) but a similar thread came up over a year ago (search for “normalized dates” on the EAD listserv, or go here:

http://listserv.loc.gov/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0901&L=EAD&P=R1817 )

 

In response to that thread, I hastily jotted down some thoughts for a blog post, located here:

http://joyner1302.wordpress.com/2009/01/15/normalized-dates-in-ead/

 

And -- as an update to that post -- at ECU we are no longer normalizing dates at the file level.  I wish that we still were, to be honest, but we aren’t really using that data at this time.  Still, for EAD-aggregate databases, I continue to think that it might be a great feature to enable researchers to create completely virtual collections, wherein they could assemble result-sets of every component level that had been encoded with, for example,  “July 1830”. 

 

Still, it’s hard to justify the time/planning involved if there’s no immediate utility.  But, if you do plan to encode to that level and you don’t have a usage in mind, you could make all of your EAD records easily available on the web so that perhaps someone else could make use of them.

 

 

Mark Custer

 

 

 

 

Good morning,