> On Tue, Mar 1, 2011 at 2:14 PM, Godmar Back <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
>Similarly, the date associated with a record can come in a variety of
>formats. Some are single-field (20080901), some are abbreviated
>(200811), some are separated into year, month, date, etc.  Some
>records have a mixture of those.

In this world of MARC (s/MARC/hurt) I call that an embarrassment of
riches. I've spent some bit of time parsing MARC, especially lately,
and just the fact that Summon provides a normalized date element is
HUGE. That potentially takes that load off of your application, should
it be forced to absorb native MARC. This is the old Garbage In/Garbage
Out (GIGO) issue. Case in point: just today I discovered that we have
at least 1,600 856 fields in Worldcat that have the pipe symbol "|" in
the second indicator position instead of the numeral one. Right, that
means there are rocket scientists who thought the documentation was
indiicating a pipe symbol in that position.

We then have granularity issues, punctuation issues, and variance in
practice. And that's just for starters. Huge props to Summon for
trying to tackle some of these things, as we are attempting to do as
well.
Roy