Wisaard Q & A

Happy Thanksgiving everyone! I will not be posting next week so I hope you all have a nice holiday. Q: What is the best practice for using punctuation or non-alpha characters in Wisaard? A: The best practice is to avoid all non-alpha characters in all free text short data entry fields such as name (Project name, Resource name) and address. Remember that whatever you put in these fields will be searched on later. The name and address fields are the most commonly searched fields and the fewer characters there are to trip up a search, the better. This includes periods, hyphens, apostrophes, slashes, hashtags etc...  If you have a name that needs some separation do the following: NO: Play Shelter,Stanley Elementary School YES: Play Shelter - Stanley Elementary School NO: Building 502/Fort Worden  YES: Building 502 - Fort Worden Q: What about abbreviations? A:  Do not abbreviate words or use acronyms for naming as these make searching difficult. I understand that it is easier to abbreviate for the sake of quicker data entry, but remember that Wisaard is also a tool to search for existing cultural resources. Data entry should enable a person to find the data later. The Wisaard does not know how to find similar words or look for parts of words. It definitely does not know how to find "Joint Base Lewis McChord" if your search term is "JBLM" or vice versa. If you were to take a shortcut during data entry and type in "Bldg." and you later came back to search and typed "building," you would likely not get the result you were looking for. Some examples: NO: UW   YES: University of Washington NO: Ft   YES: Fort NO: CWU   YES: Central Washington University NO: SP&S   YES: Spokane Portland and Seattle Railroad NO: NBK   YES: Naval Base Kitsap