I am creating a biographical database of historical photographers. I am not a programmer, alas, and am learning drupal (thru WebMatrix) for my first adventures in building a website. Hello world!
I don't yet have my info in SQl, so I'm getting a bit ahead of myself, but I'd like to toss this issue out. I have ~85,000 entries in a spreadsheet. Each entry contains the following:
Name (comprised of Title, First, Family, and Suffix fields)
Nationality
Date (either life dates, or dates of activity)
Public repositories who report owning samples of the photographer's work (I have indexed about 20 large museum/library collections)
Bibliographic sources such as other academic databases or websites, or published books or journals with information on the photographer.
Biography (a free text field for further development once I can nail down some core facts!)
Places active (also not currently much used, but will be important going forward.)
I will have questions and will need advice from the community on each of these in the future (so thanks in advance to all for any insights, sincerely!)
My current question regards the date field. I am dealing with a lot of ambiguity here. For instance, I have both photo studios and individual photographers. An individual photographer may have a birth year and/or a death year: Eadweard Muybridge (American, 1830-1904). A studio, likewise, may have a year of incorporation and a year of disincorporation. These are pretty straightforward (though I'll probably need some help for these, too). But very often I have only "active" dates, ie. some museum has a photograph dated 1867, and no other information. So I can accurately claim this photographer was "active 1860s". To make matters more complicated I have plenty of "circa" dates: born "ca. 1812" or worse: "active ca. 1890s". This is a lot of ambiguity which I really do intend to make indexable/searcheable. I don't see a module that is my silver bullet. Am I overlooking it, or is this just an insane expectation on my part? Again, all insights are greatly appreciated.
David
